The thing i love about this place is that although we all love the outdoors there is a VAST difference in how we all experience "the outdoors"
Some are extremely active preferring to hike a fair distance and get away from civilisation, others prefer a few more comforts and rarely camp more than a few miles from their car and of course there are many degrees in between.
Although this is fantastic as a wealth of experience and knowledge on pretty much anything outdoors, it's a terrible base for advising people on clothing especially waterproof clothing.
If your sitting down and not active, then even fundamentally flawed materials like Ventile will seem to be working great.
Get up and walk up the side of a hill though and that wetted out Ventile is a miserable thing to have on you, it's heavy and soggy with water and you may as well just wear 5 bin bags for the amount of sweat it lets out.
I love the outdoors, but if you gave me a choice of hiking in the rain with a ventile jacket or staying at home and HAVING to watch some talentless gimps, sing/dance/cook their way back to some weird form of fame then i'd have to choose the later
Ventile is THAT bad hen wetted out and your active.
All this rubbish about Goretex wearing out, wetting out, not breathing etc is absolute rubbish.
I've got s Goretex jacket that must be 15 years old, it's been the nevis, snowdon, Olympus, carrantuohill, the alps, the Pyrénées etc etc etc, yet apart from being a fair bit faded and being in what i guess Paris Hilton would say unfashionable colours i still wear it and it still performs great.
I do look after my stuff though, it's careful wiped down or washed, it's re-proofed when needed and stored well.
I won't discuss sitting at the camp waterproofing as to be honest anything this side of Tesco plastic bags will suffice.
But for reasonably high activity the biggest problem is that generally people are just too lazy.
They have a base layer, jumper and waterproof when they leave the car/camp cause they're cold, they then walk up the side of a hill with all this stuff on and although they know they're getting hot and sweating heavily they often can't be bothered to take the rucksack and waterproof off and stick their jumper in their rucksack.
So inevitably they sweat out then complain that their fantastic-tex jacket is rubbish and doesn't breath.
You could put a string vest on and wet it out in these circumstances, so it's hardly surprising the jacket struggles.
It is extremely difficult finding a balance of being warm enough but not THAT warm that your sweating buckets.
After a bit of experimenting though you do start to get a good idea on what works, be it opening vent zips to stripping off a layer.
For people advising others though i really think they NEED to spend a few mins explaining what activities they do, as (for an example) "advising" someone to buy something like a Ventile jacket when the op intends to walk the alps is ridiculous, but if instead the op wanting something to wear while camping 2miles from the car then it'd be a better choice.
Cheers
Mark