Apologies in advance to everyone for the long winded and rambling post.
The way I see things at present, Paddock profile sharing in its current form is destined to never achieve what GD think it will. To do that, it would need to incorporate the tools required to share a users settings in full.
Sharing only a TD profile is unlikely ever going to be the magic bullet for FFB that new users and ourselves alike are constantly seeking.
Ideally, it would need to have a compulsory mechanism in place whereby a user goes through some process of uploading their in game files and displaying their in game settings as a mandatory step before their TD profile is allowed to be published.
This is where I think the problem comes in and things might get messy real fast. It’s going to be difficult to have this system tailored to ensure a consistent way of uploading and displaying the many various tweaks that are used outside of TD and vary from game to game.
This circles back to my argument that even if it’s possible to have all this stuff included in Paddock it’s not going to make things any more streamlined than simply doing what we do now.
Here, we share screenshots and write a description with our reasoning behind the settings we’ve arrived at. To get a full picture, it’s often important that we need to show our Content Manager settings, upload JSON files or share a link to a particular rFuktor file for example.
How do you add all of this into (as I understand it) a simple dialogue box?
What this forum has and Paddock doesn’t, is the added bonus in that users who go and try out the posted settings get to come back and add their critique, suggest further tweaks and sometimes through that process of back and fourth, arrive at settings that improve things for many.
I wonder how will this will be replicated within Paddock? I don’t think it can be without it turning into another forum which doesn’t add any advantage for new users.
Without having the full picture, I can see users going through a process of click profile, doesn’t feel good, delete profile, move to next profile, doesn’t feel good, delete profile… rinse and repeat. Isn’t that going to be more frustrating and time consuming than giving the forum a visit to voice concerns or ask for tips and pointers?
It makes perfect sense that GD want to devise a way to improve the product reputation and increase sales as a result. I’m totally on board with that vision. I just don’t see this as being the best way to achieve that.
In my opinion, the best way to sell a wheelbase in the sim market is for it to have a no competitor, best in class FFB as opposed to throw away profile sharing that pleases the give it to me now social media crowd. Then again, I’m an old fart that probably just doesn’t get it 
In my view, there are different ways in which to arrive at that point. I’m speculating here that GD think that getting a massive pool of users to share profiles and filter out the worst ones will have us end up with some nice click and go templates for everyone. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t, I don’t know.
I personally think it would have been far more advantageous to have spent that Paddock development time on improving filters, unlocking filters and then handing those off a small group of the most experienced and community trusted tinkerers (what a waste of Beano’s talent, by the way) so that they could go off, do what they do best and come back with with some great profiles that then become the default templates for new users to use and have a great first impression.
Once you have those in place, that in my view would be the optimal time to launch Paddock with more established templates already in place and watch your reputation sky rocket.
I’m sure there’s some flawed thinking on my part and some holes in what I’ve said. I’m happy to have those pointed out to me if you see them 
No going back after that.