Instructions...diagrams or pictures?? Options

[Mueller]

Do you most of you actually read the instructions or do you wait till you hit a wall?

Are instructions with too many details and notes bad?

[need4speed]

yeah, well, where diagrams suck, it's usually because they were poorly drawn. If they're drawn by someone who has a poor spacial understanding of the part, or how it's used, or what it looks like - quite often they draw from a reference photo, and the photo is of poor quality, so due to overexposure or underexposure, or crud on the part, or poor choice of orientation, the drawing ends up not being much better.

And where the photos suck, it's often the same reasons mentioned above -
Or: a photograph simply can't give you a good 3-dimensional understanding of the part, because it's a complex shape, and can't be properly oriented so that all aspects of the shape are visible, and there's where one of two things can solve the problem:
multiple angles, or doing a cutaway.
If the artist is good, the cutaway can be done in a diagram without sacrificing the part.

All of these things really boil down to how much is spent on production of (I assume we're talking about) manuals. Whether they hired a good artist - whether they commissioned him or her to do a thorough job, whether they had a good photographer to take reference good reference pics, or whether the artist had a physical model, or engineering drawings to work from.

I'm an art-school dropout, and frankly, not really that good of an artist - (professionally, I do computer support, I don't really even do art as a hobby anymore), but long ago, I did some work doing drawings for a manufacturer of automatic gate openers. The end result sucked. Partially because of my poor quality work (and I was cheap, so that's why I got the job instead of someone good). But also largely because the manufacturer was a cheapskate, and didn't want to pay for the hours it would have taken to really do that job properly.

So my preference?
Either or - as long as the diagrams or photographs convey the information necessary to get the job done, for both the novice (who may not have any familliarity with the parts) and the expert. (who will likely not even crack open the book in the first place).