I note the common introduction to online posts being NEC says
, according to NEC
, and the like.
Readers should take this to mean that the author denies their contribution in making assumptions and building the model, and the influence on the stated results.
It is basically a disclaimer that disowns their work.
In a past life I wrote and maintained software tools used for design of buildings covering a wide range of disciplines (eg CAD, structure strength, power distribution, heating and cooling loads, passive solar design etc).
The people who used the tools were qualified engineers and architects who took total responsibility for their
design work, even when using tools created and tested by others. It was at all times the responsibility of the user their
to validate designs, they owned
the design and were held responsible and accountable.
When it was discovered that a certain series of Intel Pentium chips had a defect in floating point calculations, it sent us into a spin to find whether it impacted the accuracy of tools, particularly to compare test suite results with calculations on other unaffected processors… but it was made clear that at the end of the day, responsibility for a design lay entirely with the engineer or architect signing off on the work.
But in amateur radio forums, the accepted thing is to deny personal contribution to the building of NEC models, the oft unstated assumptions, blame it all on NEC. Certainly gives meaning to amateur.