I've often heard the same kind of judgement when people see a Torx for the first time.
Thing is, a curiosity about Torx born from their prevalence on cars I've worked on led me to learn that Torx were designed with the intent of preventing cam-out [1] as opposed to the intentional, damaging, torque-limiting cam-out of Philips screws.
This makes Torx attractive for all kinds of applications, particularly automated ones where fit and finish are important.
The use of something other than the most common fastener, connector, whatever is not necessarily a matter of "making things difficult".
Torx, just like Philips were both originally licensed designs, it's just that the patents have expired.
When Torx showed up in 1967, Phillips were surely considered "standard" as the patent had been gone for 18 years. Today, the Torx patent has been up for 22 years.
I expect that when encountering Torx for the first time in 1967 people ignorantly made the same assumption, that it was non-standard for the sake of being non-standard.
I've often heard the same kind of judgement when people see a Torx for the first time.
Thing is, a curiosity about Torx born from their prevalence on cars I've worked on led me to learn that Torx were designed with the intent of preventing cam-out [1] as opposed to the intentional, damaging, torque-limiting cam-out of Philips screws.
This makes Torx attractive for all kinds of applications, particularly automated ones where fit and finish are important.
The use of something other than the most common fastener, connector, whatever is not necessarily a matter of "making things difficult".
1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cam_out