Almost all software that handles GEDCOM in any way allows users to do things that are not compliant with the Standard, which was after all born of a religion that most people do not share. However GEDCOM is very well suited to studbook genealogy which is the kind of genealogy that many people are interested in. Although GEDCOM was designed for electronic transmission and interchange of genealogical information,it has not kept pace any better than anyone else with technological change.
Although in many cases the basic tools are there, GEDCOM really was not ready for drag-and-drop pictures of Aunt Agatha or mp3s of baby's first words nor for high-speed internet nor for every little device to have gigabytes of storage available. Scaling up is much easier than scaling down, so it would be easy to make too much of these problems, but worrying about devices that cannot handle record sizes of more than 35k seems very antiquated.
At any rate, most genealogical software is at pains to conceal the gory details of GEDCOM from users.
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