The Trouble with Troubleshooting OS X

Ted Landau, the godfather of Apple troubleshooting and founder of MacFixit, posts a thorough discussion of what's right and wrong with OS X in terms of troubleshooting with a hands-on discussion of a printer troubleshooting session. Much of the reason that troubleshooting is difficult in OS X is because Apple doesn't publicly document how all of OS X's innards work.  Ted gives the following as an example: MDJ
attempts to document the undocumented, and in covering the recent 10.3.8 update, they note that Apple fails to
"document what the bundle names of its own kernel extensions mean."

As Ted points out, this means that Apple may tell us that 10.3.8 fixes a fan problem in G5s, but "it doesn't mention that the fix (apparently) resides in a file called AppleMacRISC4PE.kext located in /System/Library/Extensions.
Knowing this could help troubleshoot a fan problem. But Apple apparently sees no value in providing this knowledge." I think some of this is nostalgia for the traceability of System Extensions in the pre-OS X days.
However, for the most part, it's a good discussion of the detective work necessary in tracking down the source of any troubleshooting problem. Give it a read.  And if anyone at Apple is reading this: more documentation please!