In reply to Brown:
> "I think that producing a guidebook entirely filled with guessed grades is so unacceptable I don't wish to provide any assistance to it at all."
> "It felt as though they had been assigned through the use of a grade comparison table. As such I felt they were less than useless."
> "I think however that making up french grades to the whole of southern sandstone without bothering to climb the routes is the action of total chancers."
> "I'd agree, it seems crazy to give french grades to "routes" shorter than bouldering!"
I can't recall a more offensive, unhelpful, ridiculously exaggerated and utterly stupid collection of statements from a UKC poster in recent times.
The amount of effort put in by Daimon to this book would put many guidebook writers to shame. It was a huge project over a period of five years (at least, probably a lifetime in reality) with countless trips to the area, accompanied with a small army of other climber friends. We spent many hours discussing the grade decision and laid out the reasons for this decision clearly in the book which was based mainly on the wild variation of difficulty in the harder grades from the distorted and inflexible old UK Tech grade system. When making such a change there are bound to initially be discrepancies since it is impossible to climb every route and, even if you did, you would only have the opinion of one person.
You judge all the grades as being "less than worthless" based presumably on a few grades you disagree with, and then compound that with a statement about grades being achieved by consensus, followed by removing yourself from contributing to actually establishing any consensus.
And all this in a guidebook that gave you the UK Tech Grade you wanted anyway so you could so easily just ignore the Sport Grade and proceed as you always had done.
Alan
Post edited at 19:01