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I've just spent the last few evenings re-reading my 1951 Edition of Engineering Drawing by French and Vierck, and despaired at how much institutional knowledge and manual drafting skill has been lost over the last 50-years. By comparison to the office standards I was schooled-in during the 70'a and 80's, the drawings I get from consultants, "professional" Engineers or other Architects today are poorly-drawn-cartoons.

Mine was probably one of the last college-classes that went all the way through our entire architectural education without CAD. Our department's Design Director insisted that we had to have actual job-skills before we graduated, not just "theory". We were shipped-off to the Civil Engineering Dept. first-year for two semesters of manual technical drafting, one semester if you had already taking mechanical drawing in school or had real-office experience. Then we had one semester of Architectural Drawing using the then-just-out Francis DK Ching books Architectural Graphics and Building Constr. Illustrated to learn perspective, freehand and the various rendering techniques...all this before you could take any of the advanced architectural design courses.

Now, two semesters at DeVry on Autocad and they're called draftsmen or "architectural designers". **Argh**...

I happened to see both French's book and Ching's book last night as I was digging out some books on plumbing that I wanted to re-read.
I am glad to read your note about current drawings and their informative quality. I've always thought that about the construction documents that I have seen for the past ten to fifteen years. Granted, some things are pretty good, but not knowing the originators sometimes, led me to believe that those may have been produced by someone who by hand, could have made the same drawing look like art-work. The mechanical application of lineweight information on details done with CAD can only go so far towards giving subtle hints as to depth or importance.
If you want to see some real plain "just lines" type drawings, look at the typical product that comes from Revit or Archicad.
Woody