it's great that it worked for you but that doesn't excuse them from requiring root to be enabled and the user logged in as root, especially for users who don't understand the risks..

Yes i see one of the old Stellar Phoenix version having root account log-in but there was purely mentioned that you must have admin privileges so that you can log-in from root to access the external drive to retrieve deleted data.I think that was an additional option either you have to log-in from root then install the software and recover your data.or use the admin permissions to recover data from an external drive..I check out the most recent Stellar Phoenix Mac v4.0 which is quite efficient and supports snow leopard as well.there is no root account log-in in this version.