>>Best practise over time is dictated by experts and available public or commercial sources (such as frameworks). It might not be your piece of cake, nor mine, but certainly is accepted by a large portion of the development community.
>
>My experience is that ultimately the right way to do things is the way the person who signs the checks wants them done.
>If the check signer thinks that all walls should be painted Chinese red, then Chinese red will ultimately be everyone's favorite wall color because the dissenters will either leave or go batty.
>This might sound cynical, but I don't find it that way.
>It's the way things are.
>Despite all the bumps in the road, we continue to progress technically using that model.

And that model still leaves us with some need to have, if standards are not possible in this branch of human endeavor, then best practices as the next best thing.

Because despite our opinion of that signer, he has surely grown less ignorant than before, people learn over time. And he generally doesn't care about the internals too much, he just wants it to do things he's paying for, and to operate in a certain manner... generally, he dictates the what, and not as much the how. He's paying us exactly because we convinced him we already know how.

Speaking of that "operating in a certain manner", I've noticed lots of progress. Twenty years ago, my then company has bought a laser printer, and it came with a hefty manual, lots of caveats and about 20 minutes of installation procedure. Two months ago, I got a laser printer which had a single page of installation manual, and that was pictures only. We got it installed in two minutes, and it worked without anyone even opening the operation manual. I'm not even sure what brand it is, I guess I'll have to find out when the toner runs out.