@snailboat I actually loathed the Genki series... I cannot think of a single strength it has over other options.

(It must have one... since other people seem to like it so much... I just don't know what it is)

I didn't get far enough into Japanese for Busy people to really evaluate it. Minna no Nihongo has an advantage for non-native english speakers (the books have versions for MANY other languages), and I should probably give "Situational Functional Japanese" a second look

I'm decidedly in the minority there though

oddly, it seems particularly popular with self-studying students... and I honestly think it's particularly bad for that exact group

The explanations of grammar are simply too shallow for the self-studier.

When you're studying on your own you tend to pay a bit more attention to the minutiae since in a class situation your teacher would be pushing you along to the next topic after you got "close enough"

Do end-users ever contemplate how truly awful multiple ways of setting preferences can be?

I have a mode setting on this compiler, you can control it with a constant in a header, a constant given on the command line "-DSETTING=3" or a command line switch --setting3

Getting the ordering correct for all of these is entirely too tricky

Not true at all. Dunno who writes these books.

Obviously, I never read any of those books myself but I have heard enough from Japanese learners to believe that there is a tendency that books want to draw clear lines between male and female speech even when there is no such line. The sentence-ender わ is a prime example of that.

If they are linguists who are also native speakers, I just do not where they live or if they actually talk to other Japanese. There is no way I have been mis-using or mis-hearing words as a born native speaker. Males DO use that　の in declaratives, period.

In informal speech, if I need to add.