Unfortunately, the fact that lots of people do something may merely be an indication of a very successful meme: consider major religions.

I will certainly grant that having a sharp restriction is better than a 15-factor balancing test, but I'm not arguing for 15-factor balancing tests.

I'd go further, but I've just noticed that I don't really have much evidence for this belief, and I should probably go see how accomplished Chinese universities (which judge purely off the gaokao) are versus American universities first.