The blog post makes some useful points. However, the main problem seems to go unmentioned - a major contributor to the roast flavor is the environmental temperature. If it is too high, the coffee gets acrid; and if it is too low, the taste can get so focused and pure that it becomes boring (although fast roasts using low ETs and very small doses are great for cupping).

But the point is that you can get the same bean temperature profile for the entire roast, and therefore, by mathematical necessity, the same rate of rise for the entire roast, and still get a different tasting roast if you use 1) a high bean load and a high ET, or 2) a low bean load and a low ET.

Using BT or delta-BT doesn't matter, it's still only one variable in a two variable (BT and ET) roast profile.

What Jim wrote is basically the concise underlying factor of any type of cooking. How hot is your oven? How long do you want to cook at what temperature? How big is the thing that your cooking?

The distillation of Morten's data based approach is that in blind tasting, for most people the biggest determining factor for flavour outcomes is roast colour. This is determined primarily by the "environment" the coffee is roasting in as Jim said "environment temperature". Closely followed by what end temperature you drop the batch will determine colour and then the time it took you to get to that temperature.

Larger batches take longer and often require higher burner settings with higher airflow. This will produce vastly different overall flavour outcome opposed to your smallest possible batch using the lowest gas / airflow combination that will sufficiently "cook" the beans all the way through in shortest possible time.

The issues around ROR that plateaus or increases before first crack, subsequently crashes to near zero, stalls for a bit and then rapidly increases (flicks), most definitely create unwanted flavours BUT are not worth worrying about (statistically insignificant) when talking about general consumers preference for certain flavour profiles.

This is the gist of the "time wasting" speech, obsession over minutia that most people will not know or care about. What they will care about is that if you dont have some understanding of your machines capabilities for roasting a certain batch size in certain amount of time using certain temperatures which generate the overall flavour experience they desire.

I think you might be misunderstanding the point. It has nothing to do with dumbing down and I dont really see what comparisons to the advancement of modern civilisation has to do with flavours in coffee roasting? Its not about educating end consumer on what they should like. Its about educating newbie roasting business on taking a systematic approach to production roasting for whatever their target market is.

As I said, the issues around ROR most definitely contribute to bad flavour outcomes (roast defect). The point is that managing ROR so that it does not do these things, is far downstream from ensuring that you understand the basic concepts of how "overall flavour" is generated with a particular coffee roasting machines environment temp / batch size. Depending on your market it may be worth pursuing better management of ROR after you have the basics nailed down.

You can have really nice looking ROR and if the basic understanding of roasting environment is not understood, its easy to get pretty foul tasting coffee. ROR guarantees nothing in isolation and often over manipulation of the gas chasing ROR can ruin an otherwise acceptable roast.