And how would you know this? Long experience as a formatter or PPer?
It's not hard to see, actually, when a P3 or others make changes which don't match the page images.
I just checked my previous claims about the problems with P3 (for example) against a pretty straight-forward text. I reviewed 200 pages from that text. P3's made 38 changes on those pages. Of these changes 7 changes represented a positive contribution towards making the txt correct. Of those positive changes about a half could easily be found by a simple tool like guiguts. 10 of the changes introduced by the P3's were negative changes -- changes that moved the text to a less perfect state. The remaining 21 changes were basically "null changes" relating to established DP procedure, which neither really made the txt any better nor any worse. Most of the negative changes were relating to punctuation, as I previously claimed. Again, it's really hard for the human mind to accept that the best thing to do when things aren't broken is to leave them alone -- people really want to make a "positive contribution" by changing things. By my calculation DP is cranking out an average of 194 books a month -- which is impressive. But consider some of the upper level queue times: 2000 books stuck in P3 = 10.3 Months stuck in P3 2840 books stuck in F2 = 14.6 Months stuck in F2 2562 books stuck in PP = 13.2 Months stuck in PP Total 38 Months, about 3 years waiting on these higher level queues, which means it takes about three and a half years in total for a book to get through DP nowadays? -- And getting longer every day. Seems "pretty obvious" to me looking at the DP "red bar" graph at http://www.pgdp.net/c/activity_hub.php that the P3, F2 and PP efforts are "out of control." Which doesn't mean that one should admonish the troops to do better. Rather, it means that the process needs to be redesigned to fit the resources actually available -- somehow you have to move more people into the roles currently labeled "P3, F2, and PP" or you have to redesign things to make their jobs MUCH faster and easier, or you have to redesign the process, or redesign the goals of the organization. I'm not saying this is good or this is bad -- I'm just saying that this is obvious! You cannot indefinitely run an organization that takes more orders in the front door than you ship out the back door -- no matter how big hearted you are.