Renaming and ignoring can cause more problems. Elements will constantly be associated to the wrong levels, if a level changes, you have to make sure you change the hidden level the same amount. In scenarios where there are dozens of extra levels this can be very frustrating. There are many situations where a project evolves and it gets stuck with extra levels. One example is if a building steps from one end to another, levels are created for each step because the size of the step could evolve over time, eventually the building is revised to be all on one level or revised from 3 levels to 2, now you're stuck with a dozen extra levels for a mid-rise building. Another example is the evolution of parking within a building, we've gone from flat parking to mid-level landings and back. Revit is short for Revise-it, it should be able to roll with changes like this. Another example is (It's not good practice to do it this way,) we've had projects where 4 buildings were put into one file at the early massing stages, the building size, shape, quantity, and location changed rapidly, sections were taken for each building, and before you know it we're left with a mess that needs to be cleaned up...yes I know these should each be in their own file...but it happened and now, after the files were split into their own, there is no easy way to clean up these 4 files and delete levels. The projects went a little too far before being split up and levels weren't deleted up front and are lingering in the project. When order of operations and office standards are not followed, you shouldn't have to spend days/weeks cleaning it up or recreating it in a new file.
The (desired) solution; if when you delete a level, you simply have the option to either delete all associated elements or reassocaite elements to an existing level.
On another note, when project north is not set or it changes for a project, all detail lines, annotations, etc should be able to go with it. I don't understand why they wouldn't. This is another action that can take an imense amount of drafting time to correct simply because a file was not setup properly or the building evolved in such a way that it would be disireable to rotate it a few degrees (I know you're supposed to rotate the site, not the building, but again, it happens). Not everyone has a BIM manager to catch these things early. Unfortunatly, what happened in our office, was that the drafter roated every single view rather than setting up project north. I guess you can't ever assume anything. Ture North and project north are the first things I setup, but the project was handed over to someone who didn't know to do this and it wasn't noticed until the project was very far along. Sorry, now I'm just venting.
