I've come late to this, and the prior 'RLM: Crap or what?' thread. I was working with the Grand Fromage, Baloo (or Smug Bastard, as I see he describes himself in the post-race Jox Jottings) et al doing the English language writing for the ACO website, and I have to say that it would be far, FAR harder without RLM. Even though we had bilinguals listening to the track commentary, RLM was often faster than them in reporting incidents - and on occasion got the story right when the commentary didn't.
Does this mean I think RLM is wonderful, and the sun shines out of Hindy's posterior? Well, no. I've only been doing LM since '95, and I do feel it's not as good as it used to be. But I'm not sure I could actually say conclusively which aspects of the service have declined. Two or three years ago I thought it was in danger of turning into the Hindhaugh show, but I don't think that's true any longer. When they first added Chuck Dressing, he added something new, but recently I felt he was rambling and irrelevant on too many occasions - but then, he wasn't there this year.
I agree that the hourly run-down was pretty erratic this year. I'd suggest they do a run-down of the top three in each class at the top of the hour, after the UK news, with a full run-down of the entire field, including retirements, on the half-hour
I haven't read every word in every post, but one thing I haven't seen mentioned is the difficulty they face in trying to cover a 24-hour race, which includes long periods when nothing of any great significance is happening, on a live audio commentary with no respite apart from ads and the hourly news bulletin. Frankly, getting anywhere close to achieving this wihtout endless repetition is a major achievement.
I did think they should have challenged the Radical team, and their assertion that they'd cured water in the exhaust pipes with RadWeld. Hands up anyone who thinks a cracked exhaust manifold can be cured with RadWeld? No, me neither.
No, RLM were far from perfect - but they weren't a complete disaster either.