Thanks for the civilized response. I do get a bit passionate about this issue.
Let people decide their own limits. Most people are decent and won't step on existing QSOs, no matter what the mode. (And indecent people can always find a way to hurt others, no matter what the rules.) The wider-bandwidth guys generally never fire up their 7.5 kHz audio in the general band during crowded conditions. But on 75 during the day, or in the advanced or extra sections where there's plenty of room -- sure, why not?
160 meters has no sub-bands for different modes or bandwidths, and, with vanishingly small exceptions, everyone cooperates very well.
I got into amateur radio through SWLing in the late 1960s. The distorted, narrow signals that were touted as "state of the art" back then would never have attracted me. What interested me were the discussions of the mostly young, free-thinking, hi-fi AM guys on 3885 and 3870 and thereabouts, who were building stations that sounded better than WGY and using advanced techniques like synchronous detection and the like to get fidelity and effectiveness simultaneously. Some of these were K3ZRF, W3DUQ, WA1EKV, WA1HLR, and hundreds of others. Many an engineering career was started because of the inspiration of this group. Quite a few of these guys are still on the air -- and manufacturers like Flex are now catering to the desires of hi-fi operators, which shows, in a sense, that they've been vindicated. These operators were able to capture the magic of radio -- and they met the challenge of really presenting their personalities and their ideas via good-fidelity radio in a way that could _never_ have been done over a telephone, while most ham stations were lucky to achieve telephone quality at best.
The day some retarded federal bureaucrat tells me that my friends and I can't run good broadcast-type audio on the amateur bands is the day I quit the service forever.
