....brings our allot of unsubstantiated passionate opinions based on ones personal experiences, not necessarily the underlying facts
I love this, to me, ignorant position I see expressed all the time that personal experiences should not be considered to be fact.
To me, there is no more valid fact than personal experience. Everything else, like most of the stuff in this thread, is simply opinion and theory.
When we went shopping for an anchor to replace our POS Bruce, sure, we read what all the manufacturers had to say. We also read "analyses" of different anchors by so-called experts in on-line articles and reviews. In the same way as most people on forums like this, they presented all sorts of reasons (aka theories) as to why such and such an anchor would behave in some way based on their analysis of the design. Not by actually using it-- most of this kind of stuff is written by people who have probably never even seen the physical product let alone used it-- but based solely on their interpretation of the design and how they visualize it will interact with the bottom.
Okay, some of that can be useful and can provide things to think about.
But the thing we based our final decision on was not any of this stuff but the testimonials and
personal experiences of people who had been using the actual products under actual conditions. That, to us, represented the
facts about the various products. We made our decision based on these
personal experiences and have never once had reason to think we might have made the wrong one.
All the rest of it, the speculation, the theories, the opinions based on guesses is just so much worthless fluff as far as I'm concerned and has zero credibility until proved otherwise by credible, actual,
personal experiences by credible people.
Which is why my advice to newbies to this forum is NEVER, EVER act on anything they read here without checking it with a truly credible source
in person.