Why is "opinionated" considered so valuable these days? In this case, it's redundant (curated implies opinionated, I think), so it's there to say something loudly. What? Are people not being opinionated enough? Is this defensiveness (if someone doesn't like what you did, well, you've already said it's just your opinion, man)?
I don't think it claims to be particularly valuable, it's just highlighting that this is one person's viewpoint and is not intended to be the end-all be-all definitive take on the topic.
Partly it's a way to head off the inevitable aggressive commenters who will jump all over some detail and how it doesn't apply to some particular situation.
I suspect it's part of an effort to push back against the overwhelming number of thoughtless "listicles" which seem to dominate the internet. I'm planning a trip abroad right now and half the effort is in finding a list of places to visit which was put together by someone who actually went there and has some thoughts rather than someone who slapped together some nonsense. Or someone who has taken the time to really whittle a list down to 7 items rather than making another useless "1200 Things to Do in Italy Mega Post!!!"
I think you're right in that "opinionated" seems like a shorthand for "thoughtful curation" which is the opposite of what search engines tend to turn up.
I see it as a disclaimer: "I don't claim this to be the best thing applicable to everyone. I have strong opinions that some people don't agree with and this list doesn't include some things other people's lists would."
In contrast there are some list which claim to be comprehensive.
I would say whether it's valuable is subjective: sometimes I want a more objective data-driven overview of trends, sometimes I want someone whom I've chosen to trust to provide partial views. Flagging it up front serves as much as a warning & disclaimer as it does a hook.
As for redundancy, they're technically synonymous but "curated" has become a much abused term and more often than not these days is erroneously used to mean "amassed and presented without endorsement". So I think the redundancy adds clarity here.
It's yet another funny trend that goes around in tech circles. As someone originally from math, my personal pet peeve is the way that tech people use "orthogonal" these days.
I guess people just want to communicate the idea that this piece of opinionated text is biased. Of course, everything is biased, so opinionated is supposed to be redundant. So it's a signal that the author understands that they have biases, and expresses them.
EDIT: I am not contesting any downvotes, but feel free to drop a note explaining why.
Possibly the first published use of the term in software was Van Wijngaarden, in the design of Algol 68, from 1968:
> The number of independent primitive concepts has been minimized in order that the language be easy to describe, to learn, and to implement. On the other hand, these concepts have been applied “orthogonally” in order to maximize the expressive power of the language while trying to avoid deleterious superfluities.
You’re using an overly narrow sense of the term in math.
Consider any orthogonal coordinate system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthogonal_coordinates). The whole point of orthogonality in this case is that it makes coordinate values independent of each other - varying only one coordinate cannot result in a change in any other coordinate. The term is used in this same sense in many other areas of math, and elsewhere. This is the sense in which it’s been used in software, for more than half a century.
Forgive my curiosity, but in what sense were you “originally from math” but aren’t familiar with this term beyond a high school level understanding of geometry?
When I see "opinionated", I am interested in the popularity of the project. A popular opinionated framework has found something that works well. But opinionated on its own can equally well be terrible. So I am quite sceptical when I see something advertised as opinionated.
I like opinionated people and sources in general because, even if I ultimately don’t agree, it helps to clarify the dialectics present in the landscape of options.
