Cubakid made my point in one sentence. Yes judge have to pass a test, yes the vast majority of them do a great job. But weight is hard to tell. I am not assuming anything about birds weights, but if you guys put your birds on a scale, and they weigh, not look, but actually weigh 7 lbs then you're very lucky that they haven't been dq for size and should breed away from that. If they actually weigh that and you don't care because "they haven't been dq and I win" then you are breeding for a trend, NOT the standard. Neither is right or wrong, but when someone says one thing over and over and then does something different, then people get upset. (Not me, I've been at this too long and got out of sumatras years ago, just trying to discuss things calmly).
Sadly we do not have height, length etc in standard as I think that'd be more useful than weight sometimes. A 5lb bird that is tall and narrow without much width and with delicate bone structure is going to look just as big as a bird that is too big til you pick it up. Or to remove the breed and thus emotion entirely, when I bred both Jersey Giants and Langshans, my Langshans dwarfed my Giants, even though the Giants weighed 4 lbs more!
To go back to Sumatras, I think owing to their heritage, they should be tall and long, but also light of bone and structure, what I think has happened is people bred away from crow heads to get the round head called for (and deeper bodies, which also results in less leg) which has resulted in a heavier boned Sumatra. Thus the extra weight. So really neither camp is 100% correct, other than discussing the measurable weight. Just conjecture and theory.
Edit: Then again, I re-read standard and the word broad is mentioned a LOT in the body description. Nothing here gives the impression of a small fowl really other than weight, and since bone ways more than muscle and fat, lends more credence to the theory I postured above about somehow breeding too much bone, which I don't have the knowledge to know how to address.
