The catchphrase of people who both don’t know what they’re doing and are too emotionally immature to ever admit they are wrong, or too stupid to learn from people who do know what they are doing.
I used to setup all my left-side cummerbunds this same way with a BFG Ten Speed and a smoke pouch, purely because maaaany years ago I had this one chest rig setup (based on totally bs I made up in my own head) which sat too low and the pouches were too fat and my belt was too high. Hence, I couldn’t cleanly draw or get a pistol mag out.
I will say that given the choices on the market now, the Ten Speeds are an objectively bad choice because there are alternatives which have greatly improved on the same basic idea over the past 15+ years. Far more so than the changes to the originals. They seemed cool and were innovative at the time, but they always had issues and they’ve fallen out of popularity for a reason. Personally I’ll never buy anything else from BFG anyway.
Sometimes gear needs to be tailored to an extent to a specific set of job requirements, but the people in those jobs know all about that and they are a minority. Whether in an armed service, or a civilian doing anything that uses nylon kit, the vast majority need roughly the same configuration that holds a reasonable amount of the same stuff – modern rifle mags, med kit, some water and some admin.
The easiest way to achieve the above and to be able to carry whatever you will *most likely* need to carry is with 2 simple types of pouches – decently sized GPs and classic double 556s with flaps. They will accommodate most things that most people need to have on them. Not in a min-maxxed perfect fashion, but they’ll carry them and when a buddy says ‘hey take this’ you’ll most likely have somewhere to put that thing and carry it securely.
Sufficed to say I’m swapping out those Ten Speeds for more useful flapped pouches now.
Obviously none of this is to say there aren’t specialist roles and equipment out there, of course there are. But if they were the norm, they wouldn’t be called specialist. You probably aren’t special, that’s not any sort of insult or criticism that’s statistical fact.
In various hobbies and sports, yes, you can ‘game’ it however you like. All depends what the end goal is, might even be optimal to break the mould. Most of the time people say that catchphrase though, it is cope. There is such a thing as a wrong opinion. I’m not saying I’m the one with the right opinions, but there are people out there who do have some and they are worth listening to.
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