I don't post as much as I used to...pre-tenure is rough on the time allotted to birding, and and living in a cold snowy climate isn't a great motivator.
That said:
A comment about how the science is not up to debate, even if the author perhaps had different intentions behind his quote, is pretty laughable, as a large amount of checklist work is subjective and art. And not even common names, which seem to garner the most anger in any checklist update. Where you draw the lines between species, genera, and higher levels of classification often are based on subjective criteria, whether it be:
the number of studies or statistical support to consider a higher taxonomic question settled (for instance, where and how the different families are related to one another)
subjective sense of distinctiveness (age of divergences, how morphologically and biogeographically distinct something is, what preserves the most stable classification),
and what species concepts you use (PSC versus BSC) and what your cut off limit is (how much interbreeding before you lump, how distinctive genetically and/or morphologically before you split).
Same applies to countability criteria. How much evidence do you need to consider something a true vagrant? Do you count ship-assisted? What criteria do you use in determination of establishment for introduced species, and do you treat a native reintroduced species the same as a completely foreign taxa
Birders continually scrap over all of these issues, most of which really come down to subjective opinions, rather than some sort of empirical truth grounded in reality.
