Why push a product that technically is redundant.
Yep, having choice in America is stupid. Thats it, from now on there shall be no car companies but Ford. In the grand scheme of things all other companies are technically redundant, no need for them.
Sorry, but i dont want to rockbox my ipod, and last i knew they had no rockbox for my model anyway. and I don't have an iphone. But i do want to stream music to my playback system using Airplay to an Apple Airport express, and control my music remotely using an ipad. All this is done seemlessly with itunes, which doesn't support flac, at least not that I'm aware of for the application above.
So ALAC is a product available to me, and I'd like to use it. You can feel free to use Flac, and if therenis no more room in your worldview to share music using any other codec than Flac, then I'll probably just stop sharing music. No skin off my back, I've got a taping rig.
I will never understand why the powers that be always want to make it more difficult for tapers to share music. Personally though, I've has about enough. I'm going to share it on my terms in a way that suits how i want to organize my life, or not at all.