Civil 3D Styles can be mystifying. So many details and picky little properties that can overwhelm and confuse the best of us. As one valiant City staffer put it,
"I'm mired in Styles."
Hear this from a Jump customer,
"Get the Jump and fo' geta 'bout it."
Now you just have to explain and train your fellow ACAD or LDT experts what Civil 3D Styles are and what they do.
Keep it simple. As we've seen lately, it is easy to get buried in the mud of the flood.
AutoCAD Style
What is a block? What is a textstyle? These are a couple of AutoCAD's "Styles". To a larger degree than many of us recognize, these simple named things helped make ACAD the big gorilla of CAD programs that it is. The Style ideas embraced by AutoCAD changed PC software forever. Really!
The Layer is the ACAD Style that everyone is all too familar with on a daily basis. In ACAD and LDT you are condemed to deal with Layers hour after hour and day after day. You have to be obessive about the Layer because it is the major way you manage the STUFF- the primitives (lines, arcs, etc).
Layers give the ACAD STUFF both structure and meaning. That line is a ditch.
All Layers do is put a NAME to an ever growing collection of properties. When you get a BUNCH of Layers then you have to MANAGE that. Usually because you change the STATE of the some Layer properties to see or plot or whatever you need NOW. The Layer "State" was born. I was THERE that day long ago.
The State of the Union
A Civil 3D Feature Style is just a special State for civil data. A Label Style is just a State for the annotation of the Feature's civil data. A Set is just a bunch of these special States applied all at once with some rules.
People this is NOT rocket science. More is Possible.
When you Get It that why you Name it THAT is More Important than what it looks like at the moment...