@jeff Moden - Can't do anything about you getting "knocked" but I can say Thanks for your always thoughtful and insightful posts that add a great deal to SSC.

Regarding your "requirements" list, I just ran into the "no temp tables" rule recently with someone who thought their tempdb usage would go to zero if all temp tables were removed from stored procedures and other data access code (they didn't know SQL Server has many uses for tempdb beyond user temp tables). Have also encountered a DBA who heavily used sp_MsForEachDB yet threatened bodily harm if you used cursors. Someone once hired me to do "optimization" by going through code and replacing cursors with temp tables and WHILE loops. Another wouldn't allow dynamic SQL in stored procedures because that "would prevent plan reuse" yet they somehow thought their 2000 line stored procedures with 20 parameters were being effectively reused.