S88 overkill?

An article in Food Engineering

Balancing Your Automation Standards - Cover Story - Food Engineering

One comment made in the article is

“I’m an ISA guy, but its S88 (for batch processes) and S95 (for continuous) standards are overkill,” asserts Rich DiBernardo, director of project engineering for Lecron Inc., Secaucus, NJ. “Projects that apply them never reach completion.”

Now, I think that is something of a misunderstanding of what ISA S88 is about, but it is understandable.

It is a misunderstanding because in fact the standard (part 1 at least) is only a guideline and does not say you must do all this, you can choose to exclude most of the possibilities in your own application.

But it is understandable because many 'S88' people push it too much, and furthermore they over complicate, seeming forgetting that the standard is supposed to make it easy for recipe designers.

What is your experience?