To me it's more common that elaborate form covers up lack of function. What's important is writing an understandable library. Documentation cannot paper over

To me it's more common that elaborate form covers up lack of function. What's important is writing an understandable library. Documentation cannot paper over a bad design. If it takes a ream of documentation to document something, sometimes the time spent on the docs would have been better spent writing a cleaner interface. And simple documentation is in proper form. I'd rather spend time writing documentation than learning some new gee-whiz framework for writing documentation. Even time spent putting together a website is time that could have been spent writing documentation. Another advantage of in-tree documentation is that the docs come with the code. When there's a separate website, you have to consult this separate place. Someone else in this thread pointed out that sometimes you can't get docs for an old version. Not a problem when the docs are in the VCS along with the rest of the code.