Actually most of the items you listed are pretty important. Remember, this is basically NI's stamp that they consider you a good, qualified LabVIEW programmer. Just because you can make a program that works doesn't mean it is a good, well-written LabVIEW program.
You should take a look at the
Rube Goldberg thread. It shows lots of example of overly complex code.
This and
this are two of my favorites. While the original code may function, it is by no means good code.
Many on this list can point to examples of inheriting code where the programmer did not write good code. That IS something your employers and customers should care about. You will not be around forever and they will at some point will have someone else look at your code to support it. There have been several instances where I have walked into a customer and told them I was going to throw away the code because it would be faster for me to rewrite it from scratch than attempt to try to support existing code.
If you don't believe in error handling, you're doing yourself a disservice. Even if you "know" a VI or property node will not generate an error, it should be wired. There are invalid values for porperty nodes, and sometimes properties are dropped between one LabVIEW version to the next. I just upgraded a project from 7.1 to 8.5 and several plot properties were no longer valid. If I had not used the error cluster, I would have spent hours trying to determine why my plots didn't behave the same way.
I think you will find most of the professionals on this list will support most, if not all, of the comments NI made about your CLD.
Personally I don't have a problem with bent wires, as long as they don't bend too many times - 2 to 3 times max.
