Exploding Blocks - Why would you?

[lou.branchaud]

I've been tasked with updating my company's CADD Standards.

As I'm going through it, I'm seeing relics that need updating. For example: They reference a mechanical standard from 1982, which has been updated several times since.  Yes, some things are out of date, but I can see why they were implemented.

However, this one baffles me:

"Blocks and groups may be created and inserted into the drawing. All blocks and groups MUST be exploded and purged from the drawing before archiving the drawing file."

What is the possible benefit of this?  I think this is unacceptable, but I also want to have a solid argument to management people (who don't use CAD) and are more likely to side with the ancient author of this document.

If anything, this proposes a world of undoing work and errors.

The only benefit I can think of is that maybe this saved some space / processing power when computers had MBs of ram rather than GBs.

Any ideas? 

[nrz13]

I can think of two reasons why you might want to explode them when archiving, although personally I'd use burst for dynamic blocks:

1) Dynamic blocks, at least, can have issues being read properly in programs other than AutoCAD (and possibly sometimes even between versions of AutoCAD).  It's possible in 15 years a drawing needs to be referenced and your company is no longer using AutoCAD, so a "simple" drawing has a much better chance of being read properly. In any case, I would keep the original, untampered version along with the simplified version.

2) The author of your standards thought it best to have people pull the current versions of blocks from the company library rather than old drawings, which would have outdated versions of those same blocks.  However, the better argument here would be to make the company standard to not pull blocks from old drawings rather than spending the time exploding them.