Yes, the decision to automatically assign Stacking membership to newly created Virtual Copies was a very poor design/implementation feature of PLv9.
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Firstly, there is not much real point to it - because, although stack membership is assigned to VCs, they are not automatically stacked (thank goodness - that would be even worse!) … so that actually creating a stack is still requires an additional manual step … so that not much has been achieved (other than really annoying users who don’t want VCs stacked in the first place).
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Then there’s the “visual clutter” created by having un-stacked VCs highlighted as stack-members - with contradictory numbering identification on each member.
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And, as @HGF points out, the result is that sorting by “virtual copy number” is broken;
– Exactly !!
Perhaps diligent beta-testers pointed these issues out to the PLv9 dev. team, but;
- perhaps there was so little opportunity for meaningful interaction between beta-testers and their handlers that the downsides of this decision was not properly understood;
- and/or perhaps the PLv9 design team chose to proceed regardless.
Who knows ?!