However I would have to assume that in acquiring this skill there had to be some point where you were less than perfect with it and fish would have to have suffered during that time. So even in this case fish would have been harmed in the process (albeit in the past).
I hope we aren't boring people who wander by and read this. Absolutes are for religions, and I doubt there are absolutes with ... ammonia. I don't think exposure is as toxic as we fear it is. It isn't black and white, or absolute. Ammonia kills fish. But it also gets blamed for the deaths of a lot of "new" fish that were already dying because of poor farming practices. We no longer talk much about teaching disease identification to newcomers, and at one time, that was a primary focus. When you bought an aquarium years ago, it almost always came with a cheap little disease identification book, and as a kid, I studied those things and prided myself on being able to spot trouble before I bought it. I wasn't out of step with how other people approached buying fish.
Our phones should make that so easy, but it seems no one uses them for that.
The old way of cycling, when the cycle hadn't been defined for hobbyists, was a very long build up of the population of the tank. It made going slowly necessary. I'll wager that someone like you, who cares about the welfare of the fish you keep, could have learned it more easily than learning the test kit, ammonia dosing methods. Read one sentence, and you've learned it. Water changes, light stocking, plants, and 2-3 months to bring an aquarium fully online.
To view it as keeping a poor fish in an ammonia soup while the filter comes alive is a bit of a straw man oversimplification. I haven't seen that suggested for ages. It's on par with saying you can pour ammonia into a bare tank, wait a week and add fish. The debate both ways isn't that simple.
There were awful practices in the earlier hobby (and if the aquarium hobby survives, imagine what things will be discovered about what we do now). I was taught the balanced aquarium myth - no water changes and old water as a thing with almost magical properties. I'm really glad we got past that one. I do have the benefit of experience, but the method I use is easy.
It's also incredibly hard, because we all want instant results. You have to look at a tank as a garden where flowers take their own time to grow and bloom. We all want to buy trays of annual flowers every year and make it instantly pretty.
Have I crashed tanks? Yes. I killed a beautiful pair of sailfin mollies about 5 years before I first read of the cycle, because I set up a brand new tank and rushed it. It was a cocky mistake, and a costly one for those fish. I learned from it.
Since we're talking absolutes we need heretics. I already said I don't see ammonia as quite the level of danger it's presented as. When I start a new tank and don't have a bio-filter prepared, I treat the tank as unfiltered. The time you spend reading test tubes and charts, I use to change water. I don't own any test kits except for GH and KH ones, and I think a pH one somewhere. I know my tap has no problem with ammonia and nitrites/nitrates, and I assume a neglected tank will. So I regularly change water. For me, that's easy, but there are no absolutes and I know some people on the forum have polluted tapwater, especially in rural, heavy duty farming areas. You work with what you have.
We're probably way closer in ideas than we first thought. My fish are not disposable, and I am not a terrible fish consumer. I have a sensitive species here I have bred generation after generation for 30 years, and I have started a few new tanks for them over that time. I expect you have projects and tanks that also have stories. I'm wordy, but if I have learned one thing in life it's that answers without backup information are worthless. If you don't share how and why, it's no use having an opinion. I hope you don't mind me going on like this! I don't want to change your approach. I just disagree with the absolute in what you wrote.
