John, you and others make several good points, and I'll bet your flying and NTSB experience weighs in heavily!
Absolutely concur that a checklist must be concise, or eventually it'll gather dust as one gets tired of reading a book, and defaults to memory for the "high points". Making it flow logically through the cockpit is a huge enabler of using a checklist. Muscle memory is easily trained if things flow, and the logic of a checklist that supports (follows) the flows makes the checklist all that more usable, and thus more likely to be used (the important part when you're single pilot and "doing, reading
and confirming").
In my corporate pilot days, we did a complete re-do of our KingAir and Citation flows and checklists. Started with the manufacturers checklist, and moved things around to make it flow. If memory serves, we did keep most everything in from the mfgrs, just made it usable. We did discuss legalities and "following manufacturers recommendations" as we did it.
My airline's checklists were completely reworked a while back, making them very supportive of (backing up) cockpit flows, and simplying them as much as possible. Items placed on the checklists were primarily items that were either not backed up by warning lights, or items that were backed up by lights, but failure to have the system set up right would result in unsafe operation (like landing gear down, 3 green, on the landing checklist). I'm confident the manufacturer was part of the process in that one as well, and they did a great job!
For the RV, I tried to combine the experience of the corporate redo, the flows of the corporate and airline checklists, the several good RV checklists I've seen out there (some on this site) and some experience from the old CFI days, to come up with something that flows in my cockpit, and that I'd really use in day to day ops.
Still tweaking it, but to provide one answer to the previous poster (on CIGAR)...my run-up checklist is CIGAR, and my landing checklist is GUMPP (flow and checklist). I've seen others mention some other really neat acronyms in other threads here, and I'd just recommend to spend some time with your proposed checklists in the hangar, physically rehearse the flows and checklists for each phase of flight (making airplane noises is authorized), and move things around till it feels good..then go to print on an easy to use checklist that works for you, and that you won't stuff under the seat!!
Cheers,
Bob
PS: And you know John, no matter how many times I press the attendant call button in my RV, I can't get a fresh cup o' joe...got a few dirty looks from my bride...but no coffee. Guess I will take that item off the checklist!