TURTLE writes:

Your ganging up all hvac people as hacks when only about
1/3 are hacks, 1/3 are uneducated enough in the business to do it
right, and 1/3 is real hvac service professionals.

I don't mean to lump the whole lot together. In any service business,
you have some that are technically competent, some that aren't, some who
are competent but with no head for business, and those who are crooks
with excuses why they're not. On top of that natural order, you have
the government contractor licensing, the EPA licensing, in some
situations the unionization, in collusion to bar entry to the trade and
to maintain prices. And on top of that, you have the manufacturer's
restraint-of-trade practices for price maintenance, which happens in
every industry that sells costly equipment (white goods, farm equipment,
cars, used to be personal computers before they got cheap), with
manufacturer's constantly influencing dealers to stop discounting and
competition.

Every bunch that wants government to enforce licensing talks about
"protecting the consumer" and "raising standards of professionalism",
but in reality it is all bout restricting the market, raising prices,
and picking who gets to practice the trade. Doctors, lawyers, barbers,
manicurists, morticians, tile-setters, etc. The chief determinant of
which enterprises are free of this and which are lousy with it is the
simple aspect of how easy it is to lean on people trying to do it. You
can police the drywall trade, you can't software over the Internet.