(In reply to billinghurst from comment #37)
> Nobody has argued about sensible defaults, nor the ability for communities
> to be able to adjust and modify. I don't see how that introduction is
> relevant.

Amgine asked, "Do we really want every special page to be creating and maintaining its own interface for user preferences?" I was responding by noting that the goal is having a clean, easy-to-use user interface that uses sensible defaults. The goal is not a foolish consistency.

> In fact if you follow that logic, we are now cluttering up a search page
> with an option that is going to be used rarely or not at all, and maybe by a
> small subset of people ...  Making visible an option that is probably used
> zero times by most user, and maybe once or two by a small number of users.
> That is perverse.

Well, not quite. :-)  Rather than having this feature (the ability to customize search preferences) take up an entire Special:Preferences tab, it's now confined to a single checkbox. This seems proportionate and reasonable to me. If the feature were more important, it might make sense to give it more prominence, but I (personally) don't think it's very important.

> I have no specific issue with an improvement or option at Special:Search, my
> issue is that Preferences = Preferences and I expect to be able to go there
> and to be able to set my preferences for search.

My gut feeling is that the real, underlying issue here is that you, me, and others want global (wikifarm-wide) user preferences. In a similar vein to what I wrote in comment 35, as a user, if you're visiting Special:Preferences often, we're doing something wrong. You should only need to visit that page maybe once a year, but it sounds as though you and a few others visit it weekly or daily. (Which is not a criticism of power-users, to be clear, just a workflow observation.) I think we should focus on figuring out how to make it so that (power-)users don't need to visit Special:Preferences on every wiki in a wikifarm.