There are 2 main problems with this type of data tiddler
- refresh handling
- performance
add 1)
In TW the page is refreshed whenever any tiddler is changed in any way. So the UI “state” can be automatically updated.
The refresh mechanism is optimized. Every widget re-calculates its internal state only if the changed tiddler is actually “connected” to that widget. So the refresh can be fast.
The problem with a data tiddler is, that it can hold many different “states”. In your example you define 7 different states. So if the line “Fall:Fork:…” changes all the other widgets, which may read other lines in the data tiddler would need to read the info and re-calculate their state, even if it did not change at all.
add 2)
That would be a big performance hit, the larger the “database” gets. So data-tiddlers are great for configuration data, or data that rarely changes. As soon as you want to write to them, they potentially cause a performance problem.
The problem for core developers is, that users tend to use existing functions in ways we never ever did anticipate. → That’s a good thing but we always have to make compromises.
hope that makes sense
-mario