I would strongly recommend you to think a bit before you make such statements.
While pre made scenario setups certainly cannot claim to be free of error, the guys who make them tend to be of the more diligent side. Otherwise, they would not take the time to lay out all the things nicely as they do.
You can pull the stuff yourself, of course, but with regard to errors, you might be able to spot that of others more easily than those of your own. As such, using pre made setups could even be advantageous.
I concede, though, that one might be more forgiving with regard to one's own errors than with that of others.
'Other issues' will be most likely questions of software versions. That said, VASSAL v3.2.x has been around for a
long time. This is even true for the latest v3.2.17 before the major recent VASSSAL shift beyond v3.2. With regard to VASL versions, updates were a bit more frequent (roughly twice a year) but mostly minor. You can review the 'build history' to see the detailed changes. The net effect is that pre-made VASL setups could be used without issues for quite a long time. IIRC what you could call major changes in VASL came with the shifts from v5.93 to v6.0.x, from v6.0.x to v6.2.x, from v6.2.x to v6.4.x and now from v6.5x to v6.6. Some of these major shifts were related to shifts in VASSAL that required adaptations of VASL like we now see with VASSAL post v3.2.17.
In this context, boards are less the issue than counters. And in the last few versions, boards would be downloaded automatically if not already present anyway. Sometimes counters got new features. This mostly did not mean that counters of 'old' versions did not work any more but that they would not have a certain feature, which you do not necessarily need in a game.
So much for the points critizised. Even if very critical of pre-made setups, they might be a superior base to build on rather than to start from scrap oneself.
By now, it should be custom by those creating pre-made setups to point out the VASL-version with which it was created along with the date. This will allow you at a glance to determine if the scope of changes would be only minor for an update.
In any case, a pre-made setup saves you time with regard to the following:
- board selection, orientation, Terrain SSR, weather. It is quicker to check these for errors than to do them from scrap.
- turn track, scenario title, ID. Highly unlikely that changes need to be made here.
- Setup areas, entry areas (if the pre-made setup features these). Again, quicker to check for errors rather than to do them from scrap.
- Pulling counters. Yet again quicker to check for errors than to pull from scrap, especially if AFV and Guns are labelled with ID letters and leaders named already.
- If you can determine that the pre-made setup has been created with an older VASL version and you really want to be on the 'safe side', then you can re-pull new counters. You would place the new counters atop the old ones and after that delete the old ones. This will save you time once more, because aligning counters outside the board is tedious business and by the aforementioned method, you can take advantage of this work having already been done for the old counters.
Bottom line:
If using a pre-made setup - even if checking for mistakes and updating - you will be quicker in the vast majority of cases compared to doing everything from scrap.
von Marwitz