Actually, I use BS3 with great success. Regarding the Brew House efficiency, i believe that number is critical for scaling a recipe as well as for creating a new recipe. While I would never argue any of the fine points you make, I don't have all the degrees and knowledge you have, nor do i have the ambition to run those calcs with each brew. Therefore, i use BS3, along with Bru'n water, and I'm making some pretty darn good beer. My SG's are always within a couple points of predicted so i see no reason to change.
So, all of your points are well taken and I'm sure they're very accurate. But ill hang on to my BS software.
Yes, but PPG is directly usable to build and scale grists, extraction efficiency is not, nor is it all that accurate. Let's take our example above, which is 1.054 @ 5.5 gallons using 10lbs of grain, which yields a batch PPG of 29.7. We want to have 7.5 gallons of 1.054 wort at the end of boil. How much grist do we need? That answer is trivial to calculate.
1.054 in gravity points is 54
We need 54 / 29.7 = 1.82 pounds of malt to make one gallon of 1.054 wort. How much grist do we need to make 7.5 of 1.054 wort?
1.82 * 7.5 = 13.65lbs
No software needed, it is that simple. This calculation is so simple that one can do it on one's head.
What happens if our house average extraction rate is different than another person's extraction rate? We just merely scale the recipe up or down by dividing their extraction rate by our extraction rate, multiplying the weight of the grist by this result, and then taking that weight and multiplying the individual percentages of each grist component.
Example
Our extraction rate is 29.7 PPG, we get a recipe where the brewer stated an extraction rate of 27 PPG
27 / 29.7 = 0.91 (rounded)
We can then take the other grist weight and multiply it by 0.91 to give us the total grist weight needed to make this recipe in our brew house and then divide it out using the percentage of the grist for each grist component, or we can simply multiply the weight of each grist component by 0.91 to determine how much of each component we need to use.
0.9 * 0.91 = 0.82 (rounded) lbs of base malt
0.5 * 0.91 = 0.46 (rounded) lbs of 60L crystal
0.5 * 0.91 = 0.46 (rounded) lbs of torrified wheat
One of the things that throw new brewers off is that very experienced brewers tend to list grist bills in percentages like I did above instead listing each component of the grist's individual weight. Once a brewer has become accustomed to seeing grist bills in percentages and knows his/her extraction rate in PPG, formulating a recipe to meet specific gravity at a specific volume is almost trivial.
With that said, we are not even talking about advanced high school-level math here. We are talking about a set of equations that require knowledge of basic arithmetic. Knowing how to effectively use these equations is the difference between a being a knowledgeable brewer and a brewer who is dependent on the knowledge of the brewer who wrote the software he/she is using. A brewer will only get so far without learning and internalizing this information (and much more that brewing software hides). Learning this information used to be a right of passage for all-grain brewers. Brewing without it required a lot of empirical experimentation to be able to get on the page. Today, many new brewers are foolishly overlooking it, often making the same excuses that you made, but once it is mastered, one will be less dependent on a deterministic finite automaton to do it for him/her. These are just one set of brewing equations that a master brewer needs to know. Calculating strike and step infusion temperatures are an entirely different set of equations that require a basic, but approachable by most understanding of thermodynamics. Brewing is not cooking.