I agree with you lhmatthews.
I see the objectives of FTM to be:
1) Develop the best and most efficient gateway mechanism to their "cash cow" > ancestry.com subscriptions.
2) Try to offer things the competition doesn't, or that are better implemented than the competition, to help drive FTM sales.
3) Accomodate user requests - considering the strain on individual system resources or overall system resources - to keep the most customers possible happy, and to attract new customers.
The last thing they want to get involved with is "best practices", especially when even the experts don't always agree on what "best practices" are.
The best they can hope to do is to make things flexible enough to accommodate the broadest range of customer desires.
To put themselves into the no-win position of author of "best practices" means they would have to play referee among competing factions on how to present things; saying this is right and that is wrong. That, as opposed to giving as much flexibility for different users to do what they want.
I see the objectives of FTM to be:
1) Develop the best and most efficient gateway mechanism to their "cash cow" > ancestry.com subscriptions.
2) Try to offer things the competition doesn't, or that are better implemented than the competition, to help drive FTM sales.
3) Accomodate user requests - considering the strain on individual system resources or overall system resources - to keep the most customers possible happy, and to attract new customers.
The last thing they want to get involved with is "best practices", especially when even the experts don't always agree on what "best practices" are.
The best they can hope to do is to make things flexible enough to accommodate the broadest range of customer desires.
To put themselves into the no-win position of author of "best practices" means they would have to play referee among competing factions on how to present things; saying this is right and that is wrong. That, as opposed to giving as much flexibility for different users to do what they want.