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You may not always have the ability to properly make those measurements... it takes me a week before I can gather enough data to even weakly show the effects of a change, and I run a top 100,000 site.

Also it is much more difficult to measure long term impact. For example, I made a change a couple years ago that quadrupled conversion rates, but irreversibly dampened growth. By the time it was evident that it was -that- change, it was too late to recover.

This stuff is easy to talk about in theory, but real life ain't ceteris paribus.

Kind of an apples-and-oranges comparison. They're not talking about artistic design.

Required sign ups during checkout is almost certainly a business idea. You'll never find a working designer that wants to include flow-breaking elements like a required registration.