Many of the early assets from Auran were faulty in the beginning if you remember. These little faults added up and made their way into other assets and the many that were copied. These little faults have added up into the 10,000-plus that the CRG is busy repairing because the basic rules set forth in the CCG were never followed or enforced. Enforced is more like it because the error correction didn't occur until TRS2006 and then it was barely a scratch in the surface. I'm sure you remember the CTDs and "errors that have occurred" messages and even a blue-screen or two when a faulty script or asset was encountered.
Times changed and products changed which made the old hard-printed CCGs out of date. While some of that information is still pertinent, some stuff is definitely out of date. We're lucky that our various versions of Trainz are forward compatible and that the newer versions will still read in the older methods with caveats and warnings. The problem with this however is the new methods aren't enforced and the old ones continue being used. I too have never thought of the Wiki as being the best thing ever. While the information is searchable, I rarely find what I want because my keywords never match the keywords in the Wiki. In many cases, it's like playing the Powerball or winning the Publisher's Clearing House lottery. There are a few Trainz users who do put in articles in the Wiki and have contributed a lot to it. Pware is one of them.
As for being a best practice, copying another config.txt file or asset and changing details to protect the innocent is not what it says it's supposed to be. This is where we run into problems as I outlined. How many trees are classified as buildings? This is only one example, but this mess really polluted the DLS and that has only been made worse by category updates and changes that have occurred over the years.
A proper template for asset creation, outside of the innards such as textures and meshes would go a long way in this regard. In TRS2006, the CCP was introduced as a way towards this end. Whilst this was a good intention, its code was so unstable that the applet crashed often. There was mention a long time ago during the TANE development that something like that was going to be introduced again but apparently that never occurred.
I agree changing course by the developers has been a big detriment for us. This causes confusion not only in content creation but also for route and session development. At one point for example, setting up scripted signals was done while the route was created. This was fine and easily understood. Then changes were made that made that a session "feature". This meant any existing routes had to be rewired again and the multiple sessions, if there were any, had to be configured. Then another version came out and that setup was back in the routes. ATLS too went through this muck and it's outright confusing now because many of us don't remember where to set this up and end up doing this process twice.
Content creation, whether that be assets placed on our routes and in our sessions, or the actual routes and sessions needs to be a consistent process. The old mantra is consistency means quality and that holds true with this just the same.
