Same misstatements/mistakes lead to same response 
There weren’t any statements or mistakes made before you chimed in with your usual objections. Your anti-breadboard crusade is just… bizarre.
tggzzz, I think maybe it’s been way too long since you were a beginner or had to teach beginners.
No, another misstatement.
Not a misstatement, only a hypothesis.
I accept that it was your hypothesis - a false hypothesis for the reasons I noted.
At my local hackspace I've recently taught absolute beginners how to create a 555 timer, manhattan style. By "absolute beginner" I mean "never picked up a soldering iron" and some were coming from an artistic background rather than a STEM background.
All successfully completed their construction, within three hours which included a talk/demonstration on how to solder, and alternative construction methods. Most completed it far faster. All appreciated the lesson 
So what? You taught them how to solder. That’s great. But if you’re teaching circuit theory, and want people to experiment and play around, breadboards have their place.
Strawman argument. This topic is about the relative merits of different construction methods, not about teaching circuit theory.
Including alternative methods enables discussion of characteristics and allows people to choose the selection best suited to their task. (Avoids the "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" mindset)
So, your contention is, to put it simply, false.
But your way of going about it is to make people fearful of the breadboard, and that’s just not fair, especially for beginners. A useful discussion of suitability means fairly presenting the pros and cons of each method, and your anti-breadboard sentiment makes you blind to their advantages. You invariably dismiss them as insignificant or irrelevant, and they’re not, and you similarly ignore the disadvantages of other methods that you prefer.
You dismiss the problems beginners have with solderless breadboards as "insignificant or irrelevant" (to use your phrase).
Which bit of my statement "Including alternative methods enables discussion of characteristics and allows people to choose the selection best suited to their task." do you not understand? (Highlighted above to emphasise the point)
IMNSHO (and that of other experinced engineers) beginners
should be very wary of solderless breadboards' problems for the things beginners do
nowadays with
contemporary components. Small components and digital logic/MCU components specifically spring to mind, as do components from a store cupboard or with pre-used solderless breadboards.
Breadboards are invaluable for that. They’re not perfect, but they’re not nearly as bad as you make them out to be. All sorts of things work perfectly fine on breadboards, as shown by the gazillions of people who use them.
You are falling into a standard trap: "selection bias". People that have had problems and were discouraged simply moved onto other things and aren't going to write about it.
Analogy: asking people that walk into roads without looking about their experiences
I am doing nothing of the sort. Selection bias is a violation of methods to achieve a representative sample; I wasn’t ever claiming to do a sample of any kind, never mind representative, nor any kind of data analysis at all. I said simply that plenty of people build plenty of functional circuits on breadboards, and that is true. I said nothing about success rates.
Selection bias is usually unwitting, and often not recognised by the person making that error.
Not that your argument is any more concrete: your belief that countless people have circuits fail due to breadboard problems is also not supported by any kind of qualitative data. We just hear about the occasional problem. We don’t know how many people tried and failed. We also don’t know how many people never tried to assemble a particular circuit on a breadboard because their experience taught them it wouldn’t work on it anyway.
I remind you that I am discussing beginners experiences, not those of experienced engineers. Experienced engineers
ought to be able to better exploit technology than beginners.
My anecdotal experience is seeing too many beginners having unnecessary problems and becoming discouraged.
Your "gazillions of people" statement is similarly anecdotal rather than based on numerical data.
I ask you to remember that bias is a serious accusation, one you should be hesitant to throw out.
Selection bias is usually unwitting.
Deliberate selection bias is disreputable, and I have not accused you of that.
You claim to worry about circuits misbehaving on breadboards “discouraging” beginners, while ignoring the encouragement and experimentation they invite. Soldering is also a skill that must be mastered, and I think you forget that a beginner’s soldering sucks, so they can’t prototype with solder anywhere near as fast (and without damaging components!) as we can.
Soldering isn't difficult and is a generally useful skill - unlike solderless breadboards.
I disagree that it is useless, and I think it adds useful information to the learning process. But above all, it lets you decouple skills: you can learn or explore circuit design independent of soldering skills. It means you can focus on one thing at a time, which is often a better way to learn.
Effective use of solderless breadboards requires beginners to think about advanced topics that they are ill-equipped to understand: that wires have inductance, that adjacent wires have mutual capacitance and act as transformers, unexpected feedback paths, contact resistance, etc, etc. Much better to avoid those (as far as possible!), so they can concentrate on their circuit.
All those effects are invisible to the naked eye; poor solder joints are easily seen and quickly corrected.
Decoupling skills is, as you say, useful. That is best achieved by (1) theoretical understanding of the key points, (2) modelling/simulation of those key points (e.g. using a Spice), (3) constructing and testing a circuit.
I believe in "throwing people off the deep end", but being there to make sure they don't sink. I've always avoided inflatable armbands in swimming pools, and training wheels on bicycles. I see how fast people learn to swim and cycle, and watching the delight on their faces is a joy.
Ah, so here is the crux of it: “throwing people in the deep end” pedagogy. That often works, but it’s also very frustrating to some people, and simply doesn’t work for all styles of learners. As I see it, your rigidity on the topic of breadboards is an example of you not recognizing or accepting that there are other, valid styles of learning than the one you prefer.
As a reminder, I’ve never said that you are wrong about the advantages of various alternative prototyping methods, only that you need to be more accepting of their place on other people’s benches, even if you don’t want them on yours. You need to loosen up your “my way or the highway” mentality that comes across as so dismissive.
Your statement are far more stridently black-and-white than that!
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