Agree that even many experts have developed some odd reasons for doing certain things.
One of our problems is that we are dealing with biology and exceptions abound. Need to accept there is usually at least one other way to get similar results.
Another problem is the timeframes. We make assumptions on a single incident or result and rarely wait the full cycle or set up enough trials to check if the results are valid or just coincidence.
I've experienced multiple times where I thought I knew what I was doing and results were good for 5 or 10 years before noticing that a particular practice had negative effects. The long timeframes in bonsai growth and development can sometimes lead us in the wrong direction for a while.
Personally, I like to listen to everything, consider it all and finally, if it still seems sound, try it out to see what results I get under conditions in my garden.
I think you realize this, but there is actually no way around this. You kinda need to be bullshitting like this. Because you are taking your experiences, which aren't scientific experiments, and you try to put them into words so you can share experienced with others.
But then you also ground these experiences in actual scientific knowledge. And because biology is so much more complicated than what we can reasonable understand, we have to also simplify like several orders of magnitude.
Which is why people talk about 'auxin' as if it is just one thing. And they ignore that almost all plants have like 20+ different transcreation factors that respond to auxin, up or downregulating hundreds of genes.
And that even for a very simple organism like a liverwort, that only has 3 (known) auxin response factors, we already cannot get a mathematical model that describes how it functions exactly, because there are already too many options.
It is like auxin is a universal hormone that depending on everything else can mean anything. Like the plant has a way to communicate/regulate many different things using the same signal/hormone. And that all these different signals that have nothing to do with each other, all use auxin as a medium. Like how sound waves are a medium for language.
But in the bonsai world, we like to connect auxin to apical dominance as if a plant only has two modes of growth. And that auxin explains this. Which works very well for explaining how to prune bonsai.
Another good example is nutrient deficiencies. That's so complicated in itself. But often we like to say things like 'phosphorus drives root growth' or 'nitrogen drives needle elongation' or 'magnesium produces chlorophyll'.
. Other people including yourself will learn. After experts step in you probably should shut up and listen but as an opening giving your idea is probably not all wrong.
