I don't think that's what Alan is saying. But may be that's because his post matches quite well with my own experience.
When I first decided to hone I had some sort of a mental picture of what I'm trying to accomplish, and how that happens. I was imagining this ideal model of a perfectly straight razor, perfectly flat hone, and perfectly even and uniform strokes that I no doubt will be able to perform. So I thought heal leading strokes along the hone would be way superior than x-pattern to achieving the goal of making the razor sharp (I actually did the calculation on how much more efficient they are), and even better - save the razor from developing uneven wear.
However I quickly realized that's not working very well and there are really good reasons why x-pattern works better. I now have a much better picture of what is happening during honing and is is consistent with what works better when you put a razor on the hone.
May be I'm still making it up and don't really understand what's going on, but one thing that's beyond dispute is that I can produce far superior edges following the traditional methods, such as edge leading x-pattern than going against them.
Back on the subject another piece of data is that I'm yet to see a significant number of people with significant honing experience who find that edge trailing strokes work better for them. I mean there's bound to be some, but even among the relative novices who tried it for the first time recently there was a lot of 'great experiment we're learning a lot', 'I bet it'll work great for newbies', yet everybody seems to have gotten back to the standard way of honing. I think everybody should be free to reinvent the wheel, and just accept that there will be plenty of 'I toldya so's in life. Some times it's a waste of time, other times it's learning a really important lesson.