OUCH OUCH OUCH ! ! !
SERIOUSLY ? REGEN ?
We need the little puke smiley so we get a green dot up there.
Q: "How many time to you have to regenerate to turn off the stupid little yellow light?"
A: "WAY TO MANY!"
So a flexible spring with 20 turns x 2 is some serious overhead in a 3-instance family table assembly.
Lesson: Move the flexible spring to the end of the tree and move the "insert here" above it while working on the assembly.
Regeneration was an absolute nightmare and time sink.
I was dealing with huge corruption issues on the assembly file. I replaced one of the springs and the squishable o-ring and the family table just went on a wild tangent. None of the states were accurate; zero positions for mechanism constraints became arbitrary; Regen warnings were off the charts.
I ended up deleting the family table and removed all flexible models and unconstrained everything (~20 parts). I started over! All new constraints, all new flexible components; all new family table - 2 hours!
Good news: No errors in regen and all the instances were now stable and reliable. Uuuugh!
...and I haven't even got to the drawing yet!
Next, my assembly drawing has 3 instances and the generic assembly. Although my assembly way perfectly happy now (green light), the drawing has all model instances displaying yellow lights. Regen, regen, regen... more regens! and finally... whoohoo! green light 
...though very short lived.
I had to set up an exploded view in model, of course, more yellow lights. I had to create some view states... more yellow lights. Yellow lights and "model has not changed..." huh? More regens!
And when it does regen, those springs are 100+ regeneration features. x3 ...x2. Easily an hour of regen time in 2 days work. Lesson: learn to manage your regen times.
So what did this teach me?
Allow for extra time to manage dynamic assemblies. Lots of extra time. in a 20 hour project, easily 25% of the time was managing the various dynamic aspects. Okay, fine. I can compensate for this as long as I know to consider this.
Again, I am not a novice at this. I have been using Creo nearly every day since it came out. I can make some pretty nice little mechanism widgets; flexible components are fairly straight forward; and even family tables are fairly basic. And I have 2 projects (1 personal that started this thread, and now a client model) and the work on the personal project really helped me manage the client project more effectively. But the whole system is highly sensitive.
So what about the fallback option?
Yes, the extra model concept. Could I have done this faster with multiple models? A spring for each; an assembly for each; 3 separate assemblies; no mechanism constraints?
Honestly, right now it is a trade-off.
The reason I say this is that during dynamic development requirements, the integrated system is extremely touchy. For a family table to "break" from replacing components in the assembly is not acceptable. Having mechanism constraints move their zero translation position is unacceptable. Having flexible components loose their "distance" values is also unacceptable. Does any of this sound familiar to any of you?
Okay, so I am venting... And I know the best teacher is experience, and I am not yet experienced in all aspects of using these very powerful features, but again, I am not a novice. It really shouldn't be this hard to create a sustainable dynamic model.
Back to regens... what is up with all these yellow lights? We need a button that says "regen all levels". This is most frustrating in drawings.
And... anyone else having PDF generation quit and then succeed the next time? This is getting to be prominent issue. Almost like it times out.