Interesting order theory. But my kids have not seen any Star Wars movie yet, yet they know all about the vader/luke reveal because of all the merchandise they own. The tortuous order is unneeded. I plan to just ignore the existence of the prequels.

Not only will there be endless distractions, but your significant other may resent you being present but not helping around the house. Even a very intelligent and rational significant other can fall into this resentment, and probably will. I don't recommend it.

Mod parent up. As an employer at a small business, if I value a four-year bachelors degree at a university at, say, a 10, then I would value a degree of the same name obtained online as about a 2, partially because of introp's observation that the quality is all over the place and is an unknown; and partially, I admit, due to personal unfamiliarity.

Am I the only poster who will stand up for the response "Who cares"? The transistors analogy and, especially, the bridge-and-girders analogy, are just terrible analogies. To the customer, the cost of having legacy dead code sitting there on the hard disk is zero. The incremental cost of duplicating that dead code is also effectively zero. Software is unlike every other engineering problem for this reason. (And probably other reasons.) In other disciplines, it costs real resources and affects the working systems' performance if half of the material in the system overall is not used. Even if it were a problem, it's mitigated by, as mentioned above, the compiler not even compiling the dead code, in many cases. The actual cost is to those of us who have to maintain the code, or create new projects based on the code. As mentioned in other responses above, the learning time and workaround time is the bad part. But, we're basically paid by the hour, when it comes down to it, so wrap the code up and treat it as a black box and move on! Ship quickly! I know we all want elegance but our job, really, is to ship working systems quickly.