So one phone doesn't work like another... so what?

We've heard a lot of unhappiness over the years from the ME camp over fragmentation, loosely defined as the dissimilarity of implementations of ME specs and other differences between devices (screen size and color depth, input technologies, etc.), which make it difficult to write applications that run on all/most/some/two devices.

Some people, often handset makers, have argued that fragmentation is good, or at least that the complaining is an overreaction. Without the ability to make devices different, they say, there would be no innovation.

An even more extensive argument of this sort appears in today's forums. In a reply to a long-running thread, Re: Touchscreen Support, signal3 addresses a complaint about the seeming flexibility of the KVM spec, by saying that a more crossed-t, dotted-i world is unrealistic:

Why are there so many different behaviors on the world's myriad of phones? Simply because it's a big world, and... not all vendors/developers create products of equal quality. Remember, quality is a subjective and philosophical notion so what someone thinks is good another may think is bad. Personally I think that "variety is the spice of life" and I don't see this as being a bad(tm) thing. Ultimately, the "invisible hand of the market" should determine what is good over time, but... in the short term, the market acts more like a popularity contest than an objective measure of "good"[...]

Are there too many non-mandatory options in the specification? Again, it depends on how you define "too many". However, the intention and spirit of the specifications is to be rigid where they need to be; flexible where they are allowed. My opinion is that the specifications do a rather good job of balancing the two... allowing vendors to optimize and customize things where they can while at the same time insuring a high level of compatibility between competing products.

signal3 then explains a story in his/her own application about working through different behaviors on different phones, saying that both behaviors make sense in context of making affordable small devices, and implying that it's up to the developer to care about, test, and fix this stuff. The author goes on to make the "fragmentation is good" case, and a lot better than it's usually made:

Anyway, it's easy to get frustrated by this stuff, but the alternative is certainly more bleak. Consider it a lesser of two evils... in one case we could have a perfectly rigid specification (in which the Java-ME platform would degenerate into a product) or we could allow flexibility where it is needed to insure that Java-ME remains a competitive platform. This way different products can deliver the benefits that their intended users demand (instead of what an arbitrary vendor may dictate). It's very important IMHO to understand the differences between a platform and a product. Java-ME & its configurations aren't really tangible products, they're platform specifications.

Do you agree? Are you willing to work through the incompatibilities for the sake of having an ME world with highly different devices that your app can run on? What are the alternatives? No variety, or writing for one device at a time? What do you think?