First off, please refer to the date of posts when re-opening old posts. I rarely visit the site currently and don't need emails about old topics.
In terms of your question, hopefully you never have to deal with this, however the recent switch from 32 to 64 bit systems highlighted how dangerous compiled catalogs are. If you have items compiled into catalogs - in my case it was third party - and then had to switch to a new system, those catalogs no longer work. As they were third party there was no source, and no documentation other than calls. This rendered all of it totally unusable on the new system.
I would also say the opinion is also in alignment with the open context that is becoming prevalent. Ask yourself is there any reason to not use plain text code files? Benefit/loss evaluation may work that you still want to go with compiled libraries. Plain text, open, clean files are easier in many ways, in fact other than possibly speed.
This is not a "its new and I don't like it", in fact quite the opposite, compiled binary file formats are prevalent in the past, a quick example would be the move from proprietary XLS files to OpenOffice XML XLSX files, i.e. the new shiny way of doing things is plain open file formats.
Finally, macro is generally pretty easier to pull out from code, even more so if you have color coding editors as they should be higglighted different colors and if you keep macros in plain text files also then they are pretty easy to work with. Compiling them and hiding the code however also falls under the same thinking as for fcmp. Code hiding/obfuscation is bad.
And yes, this is my opionion, based on various roles where compiled catalogs/binary-proprietary files have been big issues, thus I avoid them and recommend to avoid them, although as with anything its always best to use the right tool for the task. If speed is of the utmost as the expense of open source, then sure compiled would be the answer (perhaps big data for instance), but not for general use anymore than writing code directly in assembler. Code should be open clean and easy to read for all programmers down the line.
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