I think its sad that there should be talk of "siding" with one side or another - clearly there are various methods that have the end result of an aquarist being able to introduce fish safely without fear of them being harmed. The first couple of tanks I set up a few years ago, I used Kleen-Off, despite having deep reservations about adding even a small quantity of such a corrosive chemical to an eco-system. But I read and re-read the "how to cycle your tank" guides, searching for hours for the ones that seemed to be clearest and most well-thought through, and largely driven by the fear of the massive distress it would cause my wife and daughter (and of course myself) to wake up to a tank of dead fish, I was scrupulous in following the procedure and the testing process very precisely. Not because I really understood what I was doing, but because such guides are phrased with such absolute authority that they give the raw beginner confidence.
It was therefore a bit of a shock to stumble on this forum a few months later and discover that a great many people with long experience and with obviously professional-level scientific know-how to inform their points of view, were quite dismissive of the same test kits I'd invested such tremendous faith in! Looking back, 'faith' really is the appropriate word because it was very much about belief without adequate proof or direct experience.
If there is indeed a division I think it is between those (I hope relatively very few) aquarists who are willing to sacrifice, or at least risk, the health of a few so called "hardy" and probably pretty cheap, fish to the greater good - I'm supposing that's how they justify it - and those who categorically refuse to knowingly place any fish's health at risk, however hardy or cheap.
The misunderstanding I read time after time in the various forums I frequent, is that those of us (including myself these days) who do not choose to use household cleaning products to prepare their aquaria for livestock, are therefore by definition guilty of a "fish-in" cycle, with the further assumption that we do so either because we just don't care enough about our fish (or at least consider some species 'disposable'), or are too impatient or lazy to do it "properly" !!
As I have read Darrel and others explain time and time again, something pretty special happens when one creates an aquatic environment in which plants can grow and thrive: Typically what happens to me, is that some plants thrive and others melt as they adapt, and both are observable indicators of the presence of non-observable factors at work, namely bacteria and other micro-organisms LIVING in the aquarium. That said we're specifically interested in this discussion in establishing a foundation colony of nitrifying bacteria that can grow in response to the presence of ammonia and nitrites: These bacteria are strictly aerobic, meaning that their nitrifying ability is totally dependent on adequate supplies of oxygen. I wish this critically important fact was much more universally understood in the hobby, because it far outweighs most other factors.
But even in optimum conditions nitrifying bacteria multiply relatively very slowly by comparison to other bacteria:
Nitrifying bacteria reproduce by binary division. Under optimal conditions, Nitrosomonas may double every 7 hours and Nitrobacter every 13 hours. More realistically, they will double every 15-20 hours. This is an extremely long time considering that heterotrophic bacteria can double in as short a time as 20 minutes. In the time that it takes a single Nitrosomonas cell to double in population, a single E. Coli bacterium would have produced a population exceeding 35 trillion cells.
http://www.bioconlabs.com/nitribactfacts.html
Which is why the one thing that perhaps everyone can agree on, is that patience is the real key to success. Whether you use plants and their attendant microbial populations to 'seed' your tank or ammonia from a bottle, or both, or mature filter media, or one of the products that claim to contain nitrifying bacteria, they all take time to respond to changes in bio-load. When you get to the bottom of most "disaster" stories involving "new tank syndrome" its most often impatience that's actually killed the fish, ammonia and nitrite poisoning is just the symptom.
When I go back 40 years to my first tank, my parents were sold the tank, a UG filter, a bag of gravel and a load of
cabomba, swords and
elodea and told to come back the next weekend for a few fish and then more the weekend after and so on. Despite complete ignorance - because to my knowledge there was no explanation ever given as to WHY he told us to do it that way - those fish lived for many years, and being mostly guppies, mollies and platys, reproduced like crazy throughout.
Cheers