A word on evidence: I was speaking after having gone through the two games back to back, going to the length of posting videos of every single location in the game I refer to would have easily doubled or tripled the time I spent writing up the silly thing. I'm not being deceptive, I'm merely trying to be concise with the hope that I'm not losing too much specificity (evidently I have).
And when I say narrowly restricted, bear in mind that I'm comparing such chambers to earlier chambers where the puzzle tools are very simple (such as boxes and buttons). When things such as flings are introduced (which require a lot of verticality in the chamber design), entire walls and platforms typically become inert to head off skipping the puzzle, and your destination is never in doubt. The more powerful the tool, the more narrow portal choice becomes, and that's true in both Portal 1 and 2 (2 just happens to have far more effective ways of breaking chambers). I never held much illusion of choice in Portal 1 chambers such as these, the portal panel-inert panel dynamic boxed my thinking in just as it did in Portal 2. Did I notice the optimal panel earlier in Portal 2? Sure, there's no contention there, but what I contend is that it's a tweak at best because the underlying design choice remains as it always has.
When you remove 7 coplanar portal panels from an 8 panel grouping, all you've essentially done is remove redundancy and the puzzle plays out the same as it would have before. There never was meaningful choice in such a circumstance to begin with, the only thing that changes is that the player notices his target a little earlier.
You contend that this is a flaw and a big change, I don't, but that disagreement may as well be intractable because I've somehow managed to convince you that I'm an intellectually dishonest bastard. If I failed to dot my mental I's and cross my mental T's, that's my fuck-up, but my methods have not been malicious in intention. I'd love to see the discussion restarted from square one and the conversation achieve some sense of normalcy, but only so long as that wish is reciprocated. I'm not going to review what I wrote line-by-line, but I'll accept your contention that I goofed in a number of ways. Starting over from the basics should help alleviate more misunderstanding.
