"I pushed for Adobe to remove HGroup and VGroup before the release of spark as I saw these as absolutely pointless"
The point is to have the component type that you need ready for you when you need it. Don't re-invent the wheel every time. Some of these are easy to make *for us*. Things like VGroup and HGroup can be picked up rather quickly by new comers but much more and they can become complicated rather quickly and those making them can become frustrated and blame Flex for poor performance when it is their own code that is causing it (for example using bindings in Skinning). If we don't provide these components in the Apache project then that means that each developer, when they need that component, has to pause creating their application and take a detour to create the component. This is more hazardous if they don't have an intimate knowledge and understanding of the Spark and Flex component life cycle and / or the coding conventions and practices used in them. So instead of creating a few components of high quality once by an expert group of developers for 100's of thousands of developers at all levels we have 100's of thousands of developers at all levels creating a few components at all levels of quality over and over again. If we keep it in this group we get peer review, we get unit testing, we get good examples and best (or better) practices. It's fine with me if we move these components to a separate library as long as it's part of this project. Component set 1, 2, 3 etc is great. PS I understand the disadvantage of, "baking in layouts and exposing their properties to the component". So does everyone on the Flex engineering team but they do it for the above reasons. I also understand breaking the pieces down to smaller parts so that you can assemble them into the parts you need. You're talking about creating the letters, the alphabet and that words don't belong in it. I'm saying in creating an application the less detours you have to make and the more you can reuse the more that can be focused on making the app better. My 2 cents
