I agree with stripping away the superfluous. But adherence to the KISS principle for me does not lead to a bare price chart. Tools are useful and relate to a person's knowledge, skills, and experience. A chart of bare price bars on any of my display space means it hasn't been formatted and no work has been done on it. I do burn a lot of midnight oil around rollover time updating charts of the new front month contract. I find the EWP interesting. R.N. Elliott saw what everyone else saw. His spark of genius was inventing a framework to overlay on top of what he saw. As you point out, trying to fit every market movement into the framework raises practical problems. Sometimes the fit is very sloppy and backtracking is required to clean it up. In any case, theoretical perfectionism offers little utility in trading. From a practical viewpoint, counting is basic to trading. The simple reason is that the now and immediate future relate to the immediate past and are informed by it. Whether or not 3 is a magic number I do not know, but 3 is the unit of construction for a trend. Although it's no secret that the market oscillates, to the ignorant everything is hidden in broad daylight.
Each to their own and if it works for us, who is anyone else to us differently? Your final sentence is worth highlighting. Never a truer word uttered. My own personal view of Elliott’s work is that I’ve yet to find anyone who can develop a trade in real time using it; it’s always been perfect textbook examples, fully in retrospect. Perhaps you are someone who can demonstrate how it unfolds in real time? I spent some considerable time years ago attempting to get EW to yield their secrets and was unable to do so. I would be delighted to learn that is just a failing on my part rather than RNE’s. Then I’m going to have to own up to being a [founder] member of the class of the ignorant.” 3 is the unit of construction for a trend”. Sounds a little Pythonesque. Care to expand upon that statement?
There is a misunderstanding here. I do not monitor for Elliott Waves. I have read most of the available literature and spent some time investigating it. When the market is chugging along, it is not difficult to assign fives and threes and I do notice when wave 4 doesn't overlap wave 1. However, as I stated earlier, I do not count past 3. I can do better than expand and refer you to Hershey's Channels for Building Wealth for the basics of constructing trend channels with 3 points.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliott_wave_principle A PDF of his book was FREE online long ago. Search and it can be found again for download.