I believe she just did, 20 years ago, people barely knew how to keep marine fish alive in captivity, corals would surely die a slow death if we attempted to keep them in an aquarium. Research and experimentation have gotten us to the point where we can keep a number of corals in our tanks, some are still very hard to keep, gorgonians for example as well as goniapora. As someone (I believe it was Drew) pointed out, as long as we are willing to do specific tasks that will increase the life expectancy of a coral or fish then we should be able to keep them. Someone else mentioned that most or a lot of fish stores don't order fish they just say, send us a dollar amount but I don't beleive that's accurate, what does happen though is fish are ordered and if not available the supplier "MAY" send other fish to make up the dollar amount for a couple reasons. The LFS still has to pay for the permits ($85/box I believe) regardless of how much the value of the fish is or are. The supplier also wants to get paid the full amount for filling the order, it makes sense to send what you have rather than keep it and hope someone else will buy it when you can send it off and be rid of it. Yes that's a cold attitude but that's the way it is.
I can honestly say, every time someone here has said, "this fish/coral/invert/sock is impossible to keep" someone else has come along and said, "I've done it" we've all had to shake our heads at one of these posts at least. Some fish are harder to keep than others, some are damn near impossible to keep, trigger fish are going to eat live rock, they don't know if that rock has a bit of hair algae on it or some super rare encrusting gorgoniagoniaporacapricornus, they eat rock and as the saying goes, if it looks like crap, smells like crap and taste like crap, obviously it's haggis. Fish do what comes naturally to them. If it's their nature to feed on corals they will.
I'll pass the soap box off to who ever is next in line
Doug
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