Roy Lewallen wrote in
treetonline:

When trying to understand off center fed antennas, it's important to
realize a few key facts:
....

Yes, I thing you are quite correct Roy.

The advertising hype that goes along with many of these commercially
popularised antennas gives the impression that deployment of multi-band
wire antennas for the lower HF bands is a very standardised thing, a no-
brainer. One buys the product, installs it in their own environment in
their own way, and it just "works" out of the box... whatever "works"
means.

The real world doesn't work that simply.

But to a buyer with faith in the promotional claims, they can buy a lot
of satisfaction for only $69.99 or whatever, and not have any untidy left
over materials to clutter up their home, or residual technical issues to
clutter up their mind.

Today, the growth opportunity in the US is selling attic antennas for low
HF bands to new hams. Not as popular here because restrictive covenants
on residential properties aren't as common.

But, hey, a simple wire antenna with published performance figures from
160m to 2m is attractive to *our* new six hour hams. Which antenna is
that? The W5GI Mystery Antenna, you know, the one "that performs
exceptionally well even though it confounds antenna modeling software".

Owen