[bug #58500] default value for second parameter to .ss should follow modern typographic convention

[Dave]

Follow-up Comment #3, bug #58500 (project groff):

I think this passage warrants an additional response.

[comment #1 comment #1:]
> I think we should liaise with the TeX community before proceeding along such
an iconoclastic path.

But it is groff's and TeX's defaults that are the outliers on this.  (I didn't
know till a quick google just now that TeX also defaults to wider sentence
spacing.)  As an academic exercise, it would be interesting to know TeX's
reasoning.  As a practical matter, it's irrelevant.  The convention used by
the rest of the world is clear; groff's and TeX's defaults do not align with
it.

> That community and ours are the only ones I trust to produce well-reasoned
opinions in this field.

Perhaps that's the core of our disagreement: I don't think it matters how well
reasoned anyone's defense of wider sentence spacing is.  You could give me 100
reasons why it's better, and even if I agree with 99 of them, it doesn't
change today's industry standard.

I certainly can't impugn TeX's typography, regardless what I think of its
syntax.   But trusting _only_ their opinion, while dismissing those of
typographic experts like Bringhurst, the designers of commercial typesetting
packages, and the publishing houses who use them, feels a bit like choosing
your allies based on the answer you already know you want.

(As a possibly interesting side note, if I understand
http://tex.stackexchange.com/a/4726 correctly, TeX's default is a sentence
space 33% wider than a word space, whereas groff's default is one 100% wider. 
So groff's double-wide space is already out of step with TeX's much subtler
widening.)

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