While there is some merit to what you say, Meng contacted me directly before they published their Ford F-150 instructions. Not for the instructions themselves but for a write up on the F-150, which they indeed used. Any grammatical errors there may be are the result of my own failings in English, not any of our overseas friends.
I’ll not bore anyone further with exact quotes from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but I’ll paraphrase one of the chapters:
Motorcycle manuals are not necessarily written by the engineers, or even the mechanics or the production line folks who build the bike. They are written by the guy who is most expendable in the process as far as time goes. And as he has no vested interest in the outcome, the quality suffers as a result. That is after all the theme of the entire novel - quality,
If someone does not care about any project, maintaining a motorcycle, writing a manual or even frying a pork chop, the quality goes down.
Am I saying companies that produce poor instructions (which lack quality) don’t care? To a certain degree they don’t. They care about selling kits. If that means that we the builders have to rely on the poor sap who suffered through the first build and then reports on it online, then who cares?
I point to the infamous Panda M109A7 - not poor instrutions, altough parts were, but just a horrid kit in general, Do you think they cared? Or did they want the first kit out of the chute so they could make a buck or two? Or seventy as the case may be.
There is a trend these days with many products to not even print instructions at all. You’re given a site so that you can watch a video of some other dude assembling the widget. Sometimes there’s a help line, often not. Easier and less costly to post a YouTube video than to lay out, write, and draw instructions that you then have to pay to have printed.
Actually, for reasons that have nothing to do with model building, I’m perfectly fine with that concept if done properly.
And this is from my own brain housing group and not that of Robert Pirsig:
A worker who has no vested interest in a company or its product, and who is more concerned with meeting his daily quota, will not be concerned with quality. He will therefore not infuse any into his workmanship.
Does that sound like any ideology we might be familiar with?