The root of the problem is flooding out subgroup discussions, which eliminates those subgroups from the hobby. There used to be a usenet group a mere 30 years

The root of the problem is flooding out subgroup discussions, which eliminates those subgroups from the hobby. There used to be a usenet group a mere 30 years ago for homebuilt computers which had a FAQ explaining they mean home built as in boards full of TTL and using a commercial LSI CPU was considered kinda cheaty. This worked for awhile but eventually crossposting and eternal September utterly destroyed that group as a discussion area or subgenre of the hobby. You can't talk about designing a single bit serial ALU using nothing but 7400 NAND gates, some flip-flops, and wire jumpers if for every on topic post, there are over 100 cries for help from people looking for windows video card drivers for their homebuilt computer, where by homebuilt they mean they purchased a COTS motherboard and a COTS case and screwed the together. And that's how a hobby dies. Likewise these "watchmakers" are perfectly valid legit jewelers who happen to mount COTS watch movements in their jewelry instead of photographs or gemstones or whatever else other jewelers do for fun. There's nothing wrong with being a jeweler other than misidentifying as watchmaker thereby annihilating all social discussion of actual watchmaking by vertical flooding discussions of watchmaking. A good analogy of the situation would be I have passed adult and pediatric CPR certifications and several first aid classes but it would be wrong to portray myself as "an emergency room doctor", and get a couple million people to think that way and you'll destroy the medical schools eliminating the possibility of having actual real ER doctors in the marketplace of ideas, nothing but guys who passed a CPR class a couple years back. An even better analogy is there's about two places on the internet you can get nice plans for wooden clock movements, but they're almost impossible to find because there's an infinite number of websites for wooden clocks on the subject of "build a wooden box, put a COTS movement in it, call it a wooden clock". Its virtually impossible to discuss actual real wooden clocks because of the infinite flood of box-makers who install a movement in their wooden box. There's absolutely nothing wrong with building wooden boxes unless its destroying an online community or commercial marketplace of wooden clock makers. https://wooden-gear-clocks.com/ https://wooden-gear-clocks.com/ http://www.lisaboyer.com/Claytonsite/Claytonsite1.htm http://www.lisaboyer.com/Claytonsite/Claytonsite1.htm I've been working on a project from the latter site, on and off, mostly off, for some years. Nice plans and nice designs. In comparison google reports 41,700,000 results found for wooden clock, of which the top result, at least for me, is a plastic wood trimmed clock on Amazon using a quartz movement that atomically regulates itself to the radio station WWVB, pretty much the opposite of what I'm looking for. I did not check the other 41,699,999 other sites but they're probably very similar, fake wood box for sale that happens to contain a quartz clock movement or make your own wood box as an exercise in wood box making that can have a COTS quartz movement installed. A similar analogy is that gray market low quality counterfeit products ruin the marketplace and social discussion of the actual non-counterfeit subject. Or in summary, the folks in the linked article are doing something cool; it has nothing to do with watchmaking, but it is cool to make jewelry.