Yeah absolutely. For a while it was a struggle to get whiteboards where I work. Our facilities manager wondered what the trouble was since all our machines could connect to the projectors that were in every room and we could just show slides.
Turns out they had fundamentally misunderstood the mode of communication that whiteboards enable and how it's different than slides.
Similar for scratch paper. Whiteboard is just a collaborative version, but in both cases you are working out incomplete ideas to arrive at a sketch of a plan. It is only necessary to capture the final plan.
<rant>
On that note, here's a rant about iPad used for scratch paper:
I sometimes try to use an iPad for scratch paper but it doesn't really work out the way I want. Requirements:
- Scratch paper doesn't need to persist very long, just while I'm still in the middle of working it out.
- The final result needs to last until I'm done taking the actions it describes.
- It needs to be easy to find the scratch papers for projects I'm currently working on. They need to still be editable in that case too.
What I get instead is:
- "Notes" organization with multiple pages in a notebook and folders, but the interface to organize and navigate between these isn't very good. I often don't bother to organize because of that. It also makes it hard to remember which notebook has the thing I want.
- Pencil and paper is still better than finger or passive stylus due to palm detection, line width, accuracy, and the need to zoom and scroll due to those problems. An active stylus can help but I don't currently own one.
- Too many choices of software, so I stick with the one I have now instead of buying them all to try them all. None of them sound like what I want from their descriptions.
- On active styluses, same problem. Too expensive to buy them all and try them. Reviews focus on the wrong things. It is either talking about writing words for a note, in which case the reviews usually say it doesn't matter what features the stylus has, or it is about art. I want to draw simple sketches of flowcharts, UI, etc. which is kinda like drawing art but not so picky about certain features.
- Partly due to organization issues, I tend to not delete old scratch notes from the iPad. Even something email-like with an "Archive" button or moving to a "Read Mail" folder would help.
- Most of the software that I've tried does not easily sync with a PC/Mac. It might have an export to PDF / PNG option but that is a one-way export.
- I do not want a subscription cloud service for my scratch paper notes. I don't want a subscription cloud service at all, thank you very much.
It doesn't answer all of your gripes, but I've gotten tons of mileage out of my Galaxy Note 3 and Papyrus.
Yeah, it organizes things into notes and notebooks, but I usually ignore that and just email myself the notes I've just taken as a PDF for later review...and that seems to work pretty well for most cases...and I get to integrate those notes into the rest of my on-computer organization scheme.
Turns out they had fundamentally misunderstood the mode of communication that whiteboards enable and how it's different than slides.