okay, yikes.
okay first:
and i'm not sure if people agreeing with the insistent (mostly roux) users actually feel that way or just don't feel like stepping on any toes.
This is an absurd thing to say.
well, you think this is absurd to say, but i felt it was a valid question to ask. maybe it's absurd that i think it's a valid question, but that's how i feel.
moving on...
so you agree with those that say that a lot of methods are equal, and that there's no way to tell right now if one is better than another. but at the same time, i think it's easy to say that some methods are worse than others. clearly, a beginner's method is slower than full fridrich. by this same logic, i think it's strange to say that an arbitrary number of methods are "equal". i doubt they are equal, even if we have difficulty ranking them right now.
my point with documentation and development and all that wasn't the idea of coll or vh or all that, i was thinking more along the lines of last layer algorithms (and to some extent f2l algorithms). if there was less documentation available for cfop, i do strongly feel that it would be a worse method. there are a pretty large number of algorithms for the fridrich method, and the availability of very fast algorithms is a lot of what makes it a fast method. if nobody shared their pll and oll algorithms with each other, it would without a doubt be a slower method. for this reason, less popular variants of the last layer are going to be handicapped, because not as many people are interested in them and bettering the method.
for the sub-20 in two months thing, if it has happened, then sorry. i've just heard of people getting amazingly fast with fridrich in a short amount of time, but was under the impression roux had a much steeper learning curve.
you say that it's possible to misrepresent things with statistics, but i think that if the fastest, i dunno, 100 or so records in the world are done with cfop, it is much, much easier for someone to claim that cfop is the fastest method in the world than for someone else to claim that it is not. in my eyes, the burden of proof most definitely falls on that second person to back up his claim.
again, i disagree with the claim that no method can be faster than any other. there are undeniably some methods that are slower than other methods. trying to apply fmc methods to a speedsolve or doing layer by layer is definitely slower. similarly, i think few people will argue that petrus is slower than fridrich. of course, more people will argue if i were to say zz is slower than fridrich, and even more if i were to say roux is slower than fridrich. how is it that no method can be faster than any other? please explain this sentence. i don't understand it.
finally, i apologize that my post gave you a headache. i certainly didn't mean to cause physical pain to anyone with it.
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