First of all, I just want to say that I really love this discussion. It is clearly an issue that people both feel quite passionate about and have a lot of diverse perspectives on. Despite significant disagreements and incompatible preferences, everyone has expressed their views with civility and appreciation for nuance and compromise. I think it is quite remarkable to see such conversation in an online forum (a lot of places on the web would have reinforced Godwin’s Law by now), and it’s an inspiring example of what makes this community great.
A lot of people have already made arguments that I would have made, so I will just try to clarify my opinion and defer the rest to what has already been said.
Ultimately, I could live with whatever is decided. If a lot of people wish to have something different than what I want, why should my preference stand in the way of how they wish to play a game on the internet?
I have a preference toward disabling analysis for these reasons:
- As @Legault and others have stated, I like how it reinforces the concept that it is not the norm.
- It also has the effect of disabling score estimation, which I think is detrimental (as I discuss in previous posts linked above).
However, the usage/availability of score estimation is quite a different issue altogether, which I think should not be directly linked to whether analysis is enabled. I guess I’m of the mindset that the former issue is less likely to be addressed than the latter, so I see disabling analysis as a stop-gap to disable score estimation.
I’m actually supportive of having analysis enabled for correspondence and disabled for live/blitz. However, since I would also like to see score estimation disabled by default for all games (except for maybe in unranked games without mutual agreement), I’m willing to sacrifice analysis in correspondence for the sake of seeing score estimation go as well.
I like analysis in correspondence since I do think it is reasonable and within the spirit of classic correspondence games from the age of paper and post. I dislike analysis in live/blitz, since I think the power of this tool becomes amplified when there is time pressure.
A long time ago, I raised the question of analysis on these forums: