It is so easy to blather on mindlessly about someone that made choices in a time and situation you have no knowledge of whatsoever. You drone on about Franz Joseph not having any knowledge of Trek and being a Lost in Space fan.
Aridas Sofia, I can't tell you how grateful I am that you addressed this issue, since I assume that's what the moral majority is thinking, too, and you've just provided me with a good reason to elaborate and reply.

First of all, let me state honestly that I think Franz Joseph Schnaubelt was a great guy. With his pipe and beard he reminds me a lot of a gentle giant (like Santa Claus or a fairy-tale teller which doesn't seem to be entirely inappropriate in this context). Thanks to the Trekplace archives (www.trekplace.com) we have authentic, undisputed original interviews with the man who, by his very own admission, was not a fan of Star Trek and preferred "Lost in Space".
Therefore, I'm simpling quoting facts, nothing more nothing less and if you have a problem with that, I'm sorry.
He himself never claimed to be a Star Trek expert or even a fan.
But apparently fandom has made him into some kind of Star Trek Saint. If his spirit is still following the debates about his work I'm confident, he'd be thinking "Guys, you take it way more seriously than I had ever intended it to be" and he'd be tempted to add a couple of quotes from Bill Shatner and Leonard Nimoy...
Regarding the amount of knowledge he did or did not have, we can just take a look at a book like his Technical Manual which I consider to be rather self-explanatory, given the many discrepancies between what we saw in the series and how it got reproduced in this book.
To cut a long story short: I've no issues whatsoever with Mr. Schnaubelt, but the way fandom has adopted his work as gospel at the expense of what's actually on the show: In one of the threads somebody mentioned that Kirk's cabin in "Mudd's Women" couldn't possibly be on Deck 12 and that the producers / creators "didn't know what they were doing".

Obviously this was a result of Franz Joseph's (unintended) conditioning that there'd only be a Deck 12 in the neck dorsal...

When conjectural "canon" gets a higher ranking than what's actually in the original series (or could be concluded applying simple logic), there must (still) be something terribly wrong with the current state of treknological TOS research.
And yet he was doing the plans and book for his daughter and friends who WERE extreme Trek fans, had access to countless film clips, and acted as unpaid research assistants.
Again, the reproductions that made it into the Technical Manual are self-explanatory to determine "how" extreme (accurate?) these fans actually were. And what was on these countless film clips? Apparently no scene with a type II phaser or an actor in a commodore uniform...
We don't know the full story behind he publications, but it's the final result that speaks for itself and reveals how accurate it is or not.
Take up a f&@king technical pen and your massive Trek cred and let's see what you come up with, 'kay? Oh wait. Ain't possible because it isn't 1973 and unfortunately you have forty years of technical advance and hindsight to puff up your arguments.
Hmm...looks like you are completely unaware of what I've been actually doing since last November: http://www.trekbbs.com/showthread.php?t=195496
Since I'm doing these drafts with paper copies (something that could have been done already in 1973) of the original studio sets (available from Lincoln Enterprises in the 1970's) your criticism is apparently missing its target.
And as a matter of fact, that's when I started the project I'm trying to finish, now.
My friend had an early and archaic VCR tape recorder and - expectedly - was always getting nervous when I wanted to rewatch a certain scene or technical detail for my notes. But notes could have been equally taken during the many TOS reruns in the 1970's.
Bob