Originally Posted by
tismfu
But if the Audubon Society used to give you pretty birds for your loyalty, you might find the bird feeder less useful
Yes, and if the complaint had been "SWUs are less useful than they once were" there would have been zero pushback (see, for example, PremiumSeat's post above, which has 2 likes and no replies pushing back). But that wasn't the complaint; the complaint was that they are totally useless, which is obviously false.
What I think set several people off, and what I tried to illustrate in my whimsical analogy, were the claims of
general uselessness based on
individual requirements. Every poster in this thread taking issue with "SWUs are useless" has acknowledged that they may not be useful
to certain individuals. But as many, many of us have gotten a lot of value from them, they are not useless in the absolute sense claimed repeatedly here.
Not sure why that point seems so hard for some folks to understand, or why there's such intricate argumentation around it. It's a factual matter: many people find SWUs useful, ergo they are not useless.