This certainly has been an interesting thread so far with a lot of people making a lot of statements and some making judgements.
Since I am one of the founders of this forum, I thought I would bring up it's intent.
There were far to many threads about Hogarthian configuration and BP/W setups in the BC forum and were very fragmented and hard to keep track of. Many divers use the Hogarthian configuration or at least their own personal version of it, but do not meet the DIR standards, so, we needed someplace to discuss our thoughts and ideas. We felt it should not be required to filter through the entire BC forum to find threads which interested. Nor did we feel it necessary for us to go get beat up on in the DIR forum for not meeting a "standard" configuration.
As to the point raised near the beginning of this thread about buddies knowing each other's configuration, that is exactly the point of Hogarthian IMO. Not that everything is in exactly the same place on every single rig, but, in most cases, most things will be the same. Then it's just a simple matter of doing a pre-dive buddy brief with a new buddy, which should be done anyway.
Bottom line, if someone comes up to me and tells me something has to be a certain way and can't back it up with a safety reason for that statement, they're not diving with me. My gear is configured the way it is because I like it that way and it works for me. All my buddies have been briefed where everything is on my gear, just as I have been briefed on their gear.