Stephen

Sorry. I did spell your name wrong. I have two Steven's in my extended family, so it was just a little slip-up in the differing versions of the name.

I was interested that you commented;

"Personally, I'm not a fan of knowing the PA ahead of time. Kind of a 'plot spoiler'."

In my own experience, the loss of this position angle data would not make a very useful list, as it removes the much needed data regarding real identification. Although the use of computer-aided positioning of telescopes is a huge advantage - the observer still need to make a positive identification of what he or she is observing. Whilst it might be not really be needed for visual observations, this remains important because it;

- Assists in not confusing the double stars from one another. Furthermore, it assists observers who don't know the orientation of the field. Those using Dobs or star diagonals - unless they are aligned to the local meridian, will find that the orientation will be jumbled anyway!

- With the borderline pairs, the resolution of the telescope will be either elongated in a particular direction or just appear single. If you don't know the direction of orientation, it assists identifying the correct pair - otherwise you may have a field of mostly single stars.

- It gives clues to the veracity of any the given PA and Separation at a particular date. Some systems can change very rapidly over a short period. This can be due to such things as a highly eccentric orbit, where apastron will seemingly be fixed for significant time followed by rapid change and reducing separations.

- Without the date of the last measure of the pair, the position angle (and separation) would be only an estimation anyway.

- Completely discards the historical adoption of "standard" observation methods used for the last 180 years. Ie. The observations position angle and separation through the decades or centuries are used to determine the attachment of stars as binaries or optical pairs.

(COMMENT : This sounds more like the adopted Americanised philosophy of the "Astronomy League" - AL. Although AL has admirable goals by presenting most the best objects for observers on a golden platter. In my opinion, it fails quite dismally in setting any astronomical understanding of the history or nature of many different objects.
Furthermore, the addition concern with all the Astronomy League lists - especially the double star ones - is that some of the data has been deliberately made incorrect - mainly to catch out those doing their observing lists. An extensive discussion of this appears within the S33 Double Star Yahoo! Group, where numbers of AL observers were questioning some of the tabulated observing lists for their own "projects".

For me, this approach paints a very biased and rose-coloured glasses picture of various observing methods and very much fails to generate the necessary critical thinking or understanding.)