To go into great detail when tracing ḥadīth chains while editing a manuscript is mere repetition; worse, it deflects the work from its original aim, which is to publish a faithful version of the text exactly as its author penned it.
It is as though the Shaykh—may Allah have mercy on him—meant to outline a scholarly method for researchers in our own day.
For they have become excessive in editing the classical heritage: when they document the ḥadīths of books that already carry full isnāds and then scrutinise the narrators, you find a treatise that would fit into a few sheets expanded into one, even two, bulky volumes.
Someone else discovers a manuscript that fills a single volume and issues it in ten volumes…
And so the endless chain of tampering with the heritage continues (1).
By doing this, they compel the student of knowledge to purchase a book stuffed with padding.
Had they followed the Shaykh’s method, they would have published the manuscript only after verifying its wording and authenticating its citations.
As for whatever learning and further clarification they possess, they could set it down in separate works of their own; whoever wants those works can look for them. As for the writings of the early scholars, it is enough to ensure an accurate text, to document the transmissions, and to provide just enough ḥadīth tracing to indicate whether a report is sound or weak.

(10) The Shaykh—may Allah have mercy on him—would personally copy, verify, trace ḥadīths, annotate, and author his works.
Indeed, he did all this without relying on anyone else, and without resorting to computer programs that can locate a ḥadīth in a thousand-volume library in a minute or less, with no toil or effort.
This stands in stark contrast to what many who are involved in learning do today, an age in which true scholarly competence among editors and authors has largely disappeared.
The odour of this practice has spread far and wide; if you tried to count the editors and authors who do not depend on others, you would find them fewer than few compared with the hosts who run assembly-line operations.
If only they would abandon this practice and claim for themselves no more than what their own hands have written, for this knowledge is religion.
One cannot help but marvel at their situation: a single individual will bring out volume after volume of purely ḥadīth works, brimming with chains of transmission, all within a span of just a few short years.