3rd Parties To The Rescue?

In addition to a point by point photometric layout plug-in (that I remain dubious of), there are also
a handful of companies offering 'content', templates, etc. - and at least one that can develop some kind of riser diagram (although I think it's more like a separate program - that generates somewhat half-ass looking diagrams).

The fact that these exist is yet another testament to how out-of-the box Revit MeP is about as useless as fuck.  Obviously any firm using any program is going to require some time to get standards set up, but consider - I have been been in the field, handed a laptop with vanilla CAD, none of my tools, and within 15 minutes (longer than a lot of Revit models take to load and get set up) I had it set up to where I could go to work - full blast.

The fact that people are paying money for 3rd party content and plug-ins shows how desperate they are to get this pathetic piece of shit moving.  This kind of thing existed for CAD too, but (like I mention above) anyone with more than two functioning brain cells could develop it themselves in minutes - and despite having access to the MEP ACAD package - I never used any of it because it was wholly unnecessary.  

In addition to this, LISP routines can be written, even by someone with little to no programming experience to automate time-consuming and/or redundant tasks (although I rarely - if ever found anything that made this necessary in my design work due to my processes and workflow).

I should probably also add that I don't necessarily consider the Visual package to be a 3rd party solution - because ACAD never claimed to be able to do photometrics (and left that kind of thing to people who knew what the fuck they were doing).

Spreadsheets (either self-developed, or 3rd party) in programs like Excel get used by a lot of people for simplifying panel schedule calculations (and modifications) - but even these are unnecessary.

Even on an extremely complex project I can calculate panels manually (mostly in my head), and in my experience/opinion this has one serious advantage over automated schedules or spreadsheets - it affords me the chance to review everything in the project.

The truth is - I consider this half-assed attempt by Autodesk to quantify all of the compexities of electrical design to be a grave insult to my (and other designers) intelligence.  Any 'coordination', 'error checking', or other 'benefits' of Revit MeP are far outweighed by it's many shortcomings.

Lastly - it is telling (although many firms do work in M, E, & P disciplines) that they didn't deem electrical design to be sufficiently complex to get its own version of the software, and only with the most recent releases (probably due to considerable pressure) have they decided to make it possible to remove M & P related stuff from the 'ribbon' (which is idiotic in its own right). 

The Revit MeP splash screens that display on start-up say it all.  A huge piece of HVAC equipment, and maybe a few lights on the bottom of it.  They started showing some panels and conduit recently, but its obviously an afterthought, and they obviously don't give a fuck about it.