I'm still brand new at this, so if I'm off base here I'm fine with that, and hope to hear so (learning that way).
I just wrote the longest clue I've written yet, for NLER. The clue is "Horrible but common crossword puzzle answer that needs to die; abbreviation for a National League baseball player. Sometimes these things happen when you have to make a grid fit together."
Obviously I would never write that for a puzzle to submit anywhere for real, but since it's just for friends and practice at this point I'll let it stand.
The broader question I have though is why we need these at all? I'm probably going to delete NLER and ALER (and some others) from my word lists (or at least score them around 15) and see if I miss them. There is a lot of crosswordese that could probably use the same fate, unless it just makes things unworkable. If the goal is to have all the entries be mostly accessible---not too obscure, not too contrived---is it practical to only use words to that standard, and re-work grids until you can do it? Maybe not, or maybe it requires giving up too many otherwise cool ideas, which is totally fair. I'm still learning here.
If it is reasonable to keep everything accessible like that though, I'd guess that there's no need for 150,000+ word lists, which is well above most people's vocabularies even for well educated people and accounting for entries that are phrases.
How badly do we need those awkward crufty entries?
Of course, the counter argument that comes to mind is that I don't imagine this is a new idea, and since smarter people than me keep using them and smarter editors than me keep accepting them, I guess there are needed?
