>In the perfect world, there is the perfect vinyl job.  Despite some
>positive aspects of encapsulation, protection and buying time, an
>improper vinyl job may be worse than a bad paint job.

Here's what I dislike about vinyl.

It looks shabby after a while. Noble materials like brick, cedar, tile
roofing, etc. age well. Newer materials like vinyl, painted surfaces,
asphalt shingles get shabby with age. Though there is still some hope for
do-it-yourselfer building maintenance (witness the crowds at Home Depot on
Saturday), for most people moving is easier than maintenance. I believe
that sprawl is directly linked to materials that turn shabby with age, so
that when you're tired of how the house looks, and how the neighborhood
looks, then it is easier to do a spruce-up masking and answer the
seven-year itch with a move to the cul-de-sac. There's a gov't program
called PATH that seeks to address building durability. They are going about
it all wrong. I think they should rate how products look like shit well
before they fail. Vinyl siding is essentially unrepairabile and
unmaintainable. It is thick paint. When it goes bad the only real answer is
new vinyl or else sprawl.

A German colleague told me that Germany uses no vinyl products in building
construction anywhere. He said it had to do with the fact that it cannot be
manufactured without leaving undesirable environmental waste. Don't know.
I'd like to check on that.

I dislike the discourse that is used with residential cladding products.
Moisture gets "trapped". Buildings have to "breathe". This kind of
discourse in product literature reflects the proto-scientific nether world
of residential construction advisors. There are people who can describe
these effects in terms of physical and chemical equilibrium, but the spooky
paranoid stuff wins every time.