[@BrokenPromise]
I won't keep beating a dead horse, per se. We've already gone into a lot of detail here about how not having enough description will make people unable to role-play reactions to a character [i]realistically[/i]. We've also gone into how whether or not a person stops reading due to something being 'too long' is more a problem reader and not the content (people who want less description should role-play with each other, people who want more description should role-play with each other -- pretty simple).

With this in mind, I see it as less a matter of yin and yang and more a matter of people with different subjective attitudes towards these things being better off not role-playing together instead of trying to [i]police[/i] how people should or shouldn't write in the name of 'balance'. There's nothing wrong with people wanting very in-depth character sheets - with a lot of information on a variety of categories - but people who don't want them should avoid role-playing with people who do and vice versa. It'd save a lot of meaningless bickering. You're right when you say writing is art -- that means people should stop telling each other how to be an artist and just leave a piece of writing alone if it's not their tastes, rather than try to play critic with something they don't specialize in. It's like someone who writes picture books for children trying to tell someone how to write a novel, or vice versa.

That out of the way, I'm gonna keep this short-ish and give my thoughts on the couple of new details listed here.

[quote=-BrokenPromise]
their [b]non-combat skills[/b] (something sorely under spoken for in this topic)
[/quote]
Honestly, any well-thought-out 'Personality' section will include this information. Lacking the combat skills - on the other hand - just creates serious problems down the line, as we've actually discussed in another thread and therefore I don't see a need to bring it up again. Nevertheless, I've always included these in my profiles, so I agree with you about them being important.

[quote=BrokenPromise]
Another interesting trend on another forum I saw was that someone actually wrote a post for the bio. It was a sort of mini adventure with the character in it that had nothing to do with the RP. After that, everyone started doing it. What a great way to sample someone's writing ability and see how a character acts.
[/quote]
A decent 'RP Sample' (a staple on the forums I come from) section post will be able to do what you've described, but just because someone can write a role-play sample doesn't mean they automatically know how to write a character perfectly. I could probably write up a reasonable role-play sample for any fictional character you could throw the name of my way if I have an hour to research them, but that doesn't mean I know that character as well as the author does, or as well as the author [i]could[/i] by fleshing them out more. Writing up an in-depth character sheet is the only way to actually prove you know your character like a fully fleshed out person -- frankly, when people claim otherwise it's unappreciative to - even insulting to - the people who actually take the time to do so.

Naturally, as always you should take everything I'm saying here as food for people's thought, not an argument. I keep making a point that all of this is subjective and people should stop trying to butt into how other people want to write, since there's plenty of other people they can role-play with.

My short answer to the question of this thread about whether or not people are writing character sheets wrong? Simple -- no, they're not, because there's no 'right' or 'wrong' way to write a character sheet, only the 'right' or 'wrong' audience for that character sheet, and no self-respecting writer is going to compromise how detailed they want to be in order to please people.