We find that many players believe that decisions about bidding system design are either “right” or “wrong”, but instead, we find that most of these decisions are, instead, about making the best choice after considering the advantages and disadvantages.
As an example, we have seen players have heated arguments about whether the one notrump response to partner’s one heart or one spade opening bid should be forcing one round (opener is not allowed to pass) or semi-forcing (opener is expected to pass with a balanced minimum). Our experience is that expert pairs are more likely to follow the “semi-forcing” approach (and that’s what we do in our partnership), but we don’t see any consensus among experts. Which tells us that both approaches are reasonable and acceptable. So we encourage players to look at bidding system decisions as choices among reasonable alternatives rather than as choices between one right answer and one or more wrong answers.