Is it OK to Exceed the Standards?

When speaking to someone recently about Paige's cable that doubles the TIA and ISO distance limits, I was told by someone that they would not consider such a cable as it exceeds the standards. So that left me wondering, since when is better worse? If tires had a 36000 mile standard, would you buy a 75000 mile tire? The 75k tire would save a replacement as it lasts twice as long. This would lower overall costs by saving the replacement labor. How about people that use application based cables that are of a thinner diameter for those advantages even though they can not reach the full standards limit? How about companies that use cabling with headroom and margin above the standards, how is that different? Is it ok to exceed a crosstalk value but not a distance value? Just exactly which values would you consider acceptable to violate?

I think that it is important to understand standards development and why we have them. Standard enable the cross development of products between supporting industries. For instance, IEEE relies on TIA and ISO for cabling standards. This allows them to know the least common denominator for development, if you will. So for any new speed development, the manufacturers of the copper and fiber platforms let the electronics manufacturers know their minimum capabilities and the electronics manufacturers know what they can expect when they hand off an electrical or optical signal. The handshaking continues until the standards on each side are finalized.

Once that is complete, there is nothing stating that you can ONLY do the minimums as listed in the standard(s). Sometimes the cabling is capable of doing more. Sometimes the electronics are capable of doing more. Suppose you can do 200m over copper with full gig and PoE+ without repeaters, transceivers or any combination to get to that same distance. Just a single cabling channel at 200m. Is it better to build an equally non-compliant 200m channel with extra electronics, IDFs or power, just because you can keep multiple cabling channels at 100m? This does not make you compliant overall. It adds complexity and risk. In fact in secure areas you can't put the electronics in an unsecured ceiling anyway. What about transceivers? They also add another point of failure, cost and risk.

So my question is, where do you draw the line between performance, standards and overall smarter functionality. Is it, in fact, OK to exceed the standards when the application serves a purposeful need? If we are going to be stuck to standards only, why would any company try to solve a business problem with any other solution? What about solutions that are proprietary and completely outside of standards? Should we banish all of them as well?