It is interesting, but IMHO it doesn't seem to be a good excuse. At least the base system should have been very well documented! If 3rd party applications don't follow the rules, too bad for them...

For instance. The current trend in not providing any documentation at all looks just like an attempt to go back to DOS 2.X and DOS 3.X days. At that time you could do NOTHING in the OS without having the huge bible that was the DOS Manual. No quick way to fix something for a friend or a work colleague.

People are going to the extreme measure of stripping of existing documentation files to reduce application sizes. What good is a piece of software if you don't know how to use it?

While using the GUI applications are becoming even more difficult because of lack of help systems (and there is a lot of problems of figuring out how to map ported application keys to the N900 keyboard) the situation is really critical in the command line front. It is the worse experience that I can remember. There is no MAN or INFO tools. Executables refuse to show help even for the basic commands (for example "foo --help" shows "usage: foo").

I can understand that having help files in all earth existing locales can bring some bloat to the table, but not having anything at all is much worse.