As a first aside, this comes from reading comments debating dovetails. I’ve never much cared for the idea that dovetails are somehow great aside from the ability to create them with minimal tooling and hardware. Like everything else, the discussion seems to go from nonchalance to “please-give-me-an-ice-pick-so-I-can-self-lobotomize” discussions about squiggly baselines or whatever else.
What falls out even more obnoxiously is the discussion of what’s good work and what’s not and which craftsman did what and who did something else.
Inevitably, it’s mostly beginners or folks who make their living doing something else getting really excited about something that may not matter that much to any of us.
For me, that’s toolmaking. I’ve learned that toolmaking is an entertainment topic for most people, but not one that will cross beyond laminated tool projects, or anything.
Intense needling away about the quality of work or lack of in the past always lands on how much did a craftsman care. I think it misses a very important point. If you can do things finely to a standard, it’s easier to do the work. It’s a lot easier to cut dovetails that need a minimum number of chisel strokes or strikes, a minimal amount of glue, minimal follow up fitting (that’s toxic, and quickly becomes evident as a waste of time). Of course there are cases where the budget doesn’t even allow that, or where tastes didn’t and you find overcuts and other marks of haste and ease, but even those tend to result in dovetails that are threatened more in the looks department by seasonal movement than lack of fit.
It’s easier to do things well, and to not accept that you should just do them half-OK and then celebrate. When we see that a lot of older work appears to have relatively neat dovetails, rather than assume that it was an effort of self sacrifice and manicured-men attention to pretty detail, maybe it was just a whole lot nicer to cut everything close, add a little glue and push it together predictably.
It takes repetition to get to that point and identifying and solving problems. The online community falls apart because there’s rarely a good discussion of standard outweighing cactus-enema like obnoxious discussions about technique or tools or favorite guru.
But it sure is nicer to work when you allow yourself the repetition to get good at something instead of the burden of guessing and wanting to be a pro by drawer number two.
Still, I can’t help but think that someone that obsessed about dovetails and just exactly what they have to be – to the exclusion of talking about much else – is the kind of person who never goes to the bathroom without looking at themselves in the mirror for an extended period of time before leaving. Or tries to quote literature in conversation to people who are obviously uninterested in it.
Of Making by Hand with Wood and Steel 
You made an excellent point: forums are full of people progressing from bad to worse. They tend to be lacking analytical skills, or they would totally notice that compromising on quality never brings any time savings, often quite the opposite. Personally it takes me the same time to make something sloppy as it takes to work neatly and accurately, the quality isn’t some extra physical action from my side, it’s my attitude towards this very moment. And the only way to save time and effort is to “design it out”.
I think a significant part of an issue is that dovetails are praised as a hallmark of craftsmanship or sometimes a minimal passable bar for being a woodworker. So beginners invariably looking for ways to “trick the system” – somehow produce best dovetails, but without actually putting any effort in. Naturally there will be a bunch of people trying to capitalize on this and sell some magic tool, method or potion that would cut all that practice down to just typing a cc number on a particular website. The issue though is that consumers rarely care about just dovetails, there must be more to a piece, but this “more” was essentially removed by shortcutting. Dovetails is just a beginning, and while one can trick his way into a list of winners of the first round of a poker tournament, but what are they gonna do in the second and third? There are half- and full- blinds, there are sliding dovetails, there are dovetail keys, oblique dovetails, compound angle dovetails, the list goes on — just how much of a help your KerfStarter, or OffsetSetter, or silver inlaid ebony micro-adjustment board is going to be?
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Exactly, there’s a zoning in on “I have to make something with dovetails” while stuffing off the thought of “what makes people like a piece”. I don’t think the average person would enjoy making dovetails, but everyone likes to take a shot at it off and on making things that they don’t really want and nobody else would, and probably trying to start with cheap materials.
I still think by far ….by far…the most important thing someone needs to figure out is what they want to make well. that may be contoured MDF turntable bases with exotic veneers.
My wife works in healthcare. She’s not a doc (rather a PT), but she’s got a gaggle of doc friends. Not a single one of them has interest in hand made furniture, including two doc households. If they’re not buying it, it becomes a hobby. If it’s a hobby, there’s no reason to build things you don’t want just because they’re required entry.
Getting people tied up in the idea that they need to stop (even if it’s just implied) and get their joinery just so before they decide what they actually want to make (that isn’t shop furniture or nesting) is dippy.
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