The whole “the lawyers made us move setting for non-PG materials to beyond the manual” is annoying (and certainly inspires me to not post as frequently, because I’m trying to help other folks do similar things, and not posting settings is not helping. Whenever our corporate FNLs (and @Dan, trust me compared to hospital lawyers, yours are not even in the true “risk-adverse” category…) come up with something like this, I demand evidence that a change that will annoy my customers actually is a real thing (like show me case precedents that this actually was ruled on); this is similar to all the absuridity in EULAs where a bunch of folks finally said, show us that any of this was actually enforceable under case-law, and of course most wasn’t, so a lot of EULAs have gotten way simpler. I can’t imagine a judge going “Oh, since they were in a separate thread on the forum, we will dismiss the suit!”…
Plus 100 
In general I agree with post of the comments above, but personally I don’t use the categories much. Rather than bounce around the site I typically just check the “Latest” section and read anything that looks interesting. The category labels are sometimes useful for letting me know what to expect when a post isn’t titled descriptively, but other than that I mostly ignore them.
Probably not very helpful to the question at hand but thought I’d mention it since it seems to be different than how most use the forum.
That’s how I use it. Just keep going until there are no New or Unread left.
I only use the categories when I’m starting a new thread. When I’m reading, I usually don’t know which one I’m in 
i read the same way. but it’s different reading than posting. when you post, you have to choose the proper category.
I agree on the Idea Hopper. I have been wondering where in this structure it was best to post things like that.
I think its going to need to be either very high standards - everything is guaranteed awesome - or essentially no standards at all with infrastructure for ratings / review. Then possibly some promotion for well received designs. The in between is just too slippery and labor intensive to enforce.
Really it comes downs to the extent they want to supplant Thingiverse, etc for laser, or at least Glowforge specific designs.
Not having a laser yet, I haven’t had to deal first hand with the Made on a Glowforge/Beyond the Manual dichotomy.
My opinion is that it does not help the users, nor do I see it as a useful distinction leagally–but I am not a lawyer, Friendly Neighborhood or other.
I would suggest that a more useful distinction for BtM would be things that would be egregious warrantee breakers…case mods, adding chillers to Basics, etc.
Failing a change in the posting rules, making it somehow easy to make a two-part post with crosslinks between MoaGF and BtM, or I think I saw someone suggest a “spoiler” type tag to obscure settings and have a “do this at your own risk” message when the settings are revealed.
This seems like a good way to go. Post a picture and description of something you made and, if you want, link to the design.
My biggest objection to the FLD category is that posting files to a forum is a terrible way to share them. There is no infrastructure for iteration of forking. I rarely have anything I would consider “final” so what happens as I update it. Do I keep posting new versions?
Much better to use Github or Thingiverse or whatever and post a link.
Music to my ears.
I agree about the too-fast closing of some discussions. Maybe the GF support people could use the “Solved” checkmark instead, indicating that their response is done, but that we can still natter amongst ourselves.
Non-PG does not mean it goes to Beyond the Manual. But if it’s non-PG, and the material could be a cause of the symptom being reported, then it does. (And you’d be surprised with the many unusual ways that material can be a cause!)
A similar case is exhaust - DIY exhaust solutions can cause many unusual and seemingly unrelated problems.
Indeed, the support team is all about closing out topics; it’s one of the reasons we have a really different approach in Problems & Support vs. the freewheeling rest of the forum. (For the record, I love the rest of the forum!). Any suggestions for improvement?
@henryhbk, this was the concession after much wrangling. You wouldn’t have liked the FNL’s recommendations.
@lawbecke Thanks for the feedback! That’s how I read it too.
@brian1 For now, Problems & Support if you want to submit an idea and then have it closed; Everything Else if you want to spitball an idea around.
@paulw Thanks for the suggestion!
I don’t want to be getting into semantics but “could be” seems to be jumping the gun on closing a support ticket. The symptom “could also not be” a result of the material used. For example, on the thread from @henryhbk about the image engrave becoming lighter as it progressed upwards:
The immediate reply was that the problem is out of scope because it was non-PG material and that “could be” the cause. It could also not be cause - it hadn’t been established that non-PG was the issue. He was never asked to try to reproduce the error on PG.
Even if support wanted to get the ticket closed, perhaps the suggestion should have been something along the lines of:
I see you are using non-PG material - could you attempt to replicate the issue using Proofgrade? I’m going to close this ticket now, but if it happens again, please open a new thread here in Problems and Support. If not reproducible, it’s more likely a material issue and help can be sought in the Beyond the Manual category from the community.
That’s a great suggestion.
I feel the same way about this.
Maybe if they’re not to those pristine standards, they would not show up readily in browsing the store unless you went to a category of “user submitted” or something like that? Then, there could be a note that “the instructions for these designs might not be quite as thorough, but we didn’t want to keep great designs from our customers.” And then the “pristine” ones (let me clarify that I think your stuff is pristine, I’m just using your words) would hold a more premium value, and the user submitted ones with lesser instructions, etc would be a little more discounted.
Same way that I use it.
I actually have a fair-to-middling amount of experience selling file designs. (Created a couple of thousand, sold a few dozen, over a two year period. And the dozens paid for the endeavor, so I’m not knocking it. You never know what will be popular, and a lot of those were personalized, so easy to batch produce.)
The problem with not having them “pristine ala’ Glowforge” is that you wind up spending more time after the fact answering questions than you do if you would have just made them pristine in the first place. Glowforge is definitely ahead of the game on this one.
My problem is time. I could easily bring them up to a salable standard, but assembly is a heck of a lot more finicky for 3D designs than for the 2D work I was selling before. It’s going to really slow down the output rate on the “some assembly required” designs. (And it needs to be in place - you wouldn’t believe how many questions you get on a simple 2D cutting file that appears to be completely self-explanatory. Like - “No, the eyes go on top of the face, not underneath”.)
I think for the more challenging assembly ones I’ll wait to see what GF has done, because the couple I have access to are beautifully explained with photos and clear steps. I could come up with something similar, but not to that level.
I’m interested to see what everyone else who wants to sell designs comes up with as far as structure is concerned, and see what GF is planning to do in terms of tracking and reporting the sales for tax purposes. I don’t know if they’re planning to handle it, or if the designers will be responsible for tracking and reporting their own. If GF takes care of it, what kind of percentage do they want in exchange for marketing the designers work through their catalog, handling the sales, dealing with the tax reporting, etc.?
Lots of questions still to be answered on the catalog, and they’re up to their eyeballs in shipping out right now, so this is bound to be a while yet. I’m being patient. 
Completely agree. I never thought about that.