Re: \"graderball\"??
I do not think it is by nature any more "booty fab" than radius arms, 3 links, etc. For some reason people seem to have adopted the term "booty fab" for anything that does not meet their criteria or particular sense of "proper". How someone can arbitrarily call a suspension system that has worked very successfully on many commercially produced vehicles (Mogs are a relevant example) as well as competitive vehicles is beyond me. An implementation can be "booty" in the extreme, but I've seen equally pathetic implementations in both "torque tube/arm" suspensions and triangulated 4 link or (take your pick).
It's just another way of implementing a suspension, and like all others, it has pros and cons that must be analyzed to determine if it's right for you. Otherwise you're just winging it and hoping to get something that works "well enough". And you can't even go by what you see others doing since their goals may be weighted differently than yours, or they *may not even realize* that their solution could have been much better with more planning or a different design.
The pro/con issues stack up in various categories along side those of other suspensions and allow us to determine which way we want to go. How important is cost? Is unsprung weight an issue? What weight vehicle and where is the CG? (Location of CG may be important in that you may require a virtual link intersection to control things like anti-squat and roll axis) What intended usage? Do you have room for the style or sufficient chassis mounting points? Do you want to make a major change to address deficiencies in the existing chassis? How important are each of the geometric factors like anti-squat, roll axis, torque roll, asymmetric jacking, and so forth? How important is simplicity of implementation? How important is tune-ability and of what parameters? And on and on… These are the things that play into choosing a suspension design, not what some self professed expert here or on PBB (which seems to have an abundance of these) decrees as "the" proper way to implement a suspension. There are no easy answers, all you can do is try to gather up the research and make an *educated* decision for yourself. I've been thinking seriously about linking for more than a year. At times I've considered the torque arm style suspension as well as most every other possibility. But because of issues with my current chassis that cause problems for most all of the options, I have not implemented any of them yet.
