Ah, I thought that the chart styles behaved somewhat akin to CSS (cascading style sheets) in html in that they set certain style elements, with contents provided from a different source.

If you encapsulate design AND function in each chart style then you're in a pickle. It's not nice. Now you have to think about how to wean people off their style which they grew accustomed to. And if you decide to implement a new feature you now have to implement it in every style (or leave the user wondering why some things don't seem to work in his preferred style). If you change a feature, ditto. Implementing a higher degree of user customization (i.e., change the colors) becomes difficult.

It's probably way too late in the game for a paradigm shift, but I still think that separating appearance and function is the way to go.

Anyway, thanks for the answer. I will try to get used to one of the SD chart styles.

Thanks, -- Chris.

I agree with ckurz7000 that the SD GUI does most thing right. It is truly a great piece of software. If it wasn't then I wouldn't make the effort of complaining about things I think are done wrong. So, please Tim, take any complaints as compliments

It really shouldn't be. I would have thought it obvious that a chart style designed to mimic a paper chart would lack many (or all) of the dynamic features that vector charts bring to the table. But there you go; everybody is different.