Just like PC's, Macs have entered the world of, what I call, "car guys." Car guys are always fiddling with things for a tiny performance or perceived security boosts without really thinking things through. In the Windows world you'll hear them tell you how you must disable the UAC, must install registry 'cleaners', must use $av_vendor_x because $av_vendor_y sucks, fiddle with some obscure registry change, use drivers or utilities from sites laden with malware, etc, etc. As a sysadmin, these guys drive me crazy. Often, they're the dominant voice in PC or gaming forums and their advice is not only terrible, but actually makes things worse for the end user looking to solve an issue.

At least in the Windows world we have ugly GUIs and other roadblocks to making these changes easy. With OSX's scripting, you could have one single script make all these changes. Its interesting to think how terrible some random person's advice on the internet can be to your machine if you decide to type in what they say. Worse, I'm seeing a lot of FOSS/Linux stuff that more or less asks you to wget a random file on a random server into your shell and run it as root. Umm, no thanks.

The above wouldn't be so bad if they all came with well written undo scripts, but I think the "car guys" aren't even considering scenarios where their half-cooked advice would be wrong. If they did, they probably wouldn't be putting this stuff out there like this.