The title is a bit bombastic but in my opinion it fits the trend I noticed here and which I think needs to be discussed.
To me it seems that many users here do not understand that some other users may have different design constraints than they do. Comments to this question made me start analyzing the problem. OP here complains that he can't find a two-pin phototransistor and one of our users claims that they are available at Digikey and believes that if OP can't get parts from Digikey, the question may be too localized.
Well, OK, that's one way to look at it. On the other hand, I believe that such attitude is simply bad engineering practice. In my opinion, one of the main objectives of an engineer is to make a working product with available resources, if that is possible.
Another interesting example of this trend are comments to this question. Again users can't accept that OP can't just buy a better part.
Yet another similar comment thread can be seen in this question where again some users can't understand that sometimes you just have to use datasheetless parts if you want to be competitive.
I have an example to post too:
Once I was recommended on this site to use 10 µF ceramic capacitors at input of voltage regulators. And where do we go to get them? Digikey of course! They're a big huge distributor and they have millions of articles in stock. The capacitors I linked look interesting and not too expensive so I'd probably buy 50 or maybe even a 100 of them and be stocked for a while. That's $14 for a 100 pieces.
So let's take a look at Digikey's website for my country. In the middle o the screen, the second center picture from top proudly proclaims that the transport price from US to Serbia is fixed at $120. Well my $14 order just became $134 order and each capacitor now costs me $1.34 and that's before customs and forwarding fees. For $1.34, I could buy an entire simple voltage regulator here and more. If I take local administration into account, the single capacitor would be more like $2.5 to $3. For $2 I could get a PCB with a full-wave rectifier bridge, needed passive components and a voltage regulator. This disqualifies the capacitor even at optimistic price of $1.34 a piece as an economical solution to the problem.
Of course, the solution to this example would be to look for another distributor, but my idea in this post isn't to solve this particular problem but to start a discussion about the trend I've noticed.
What I instead believe is that we should try to form some sort of a guideline when it is acceptable to recommend a solution of selecting a new part and when we should believe OP that a better part can't be found.
So any thoughts about this?