As the initiator of the thread, I'd like to say that although I was rather thinking the discussion will focus more on differences between ISO and ASME GD&T, I'm really glad it went into ISO 2768 direction - after all "general tolerances" concept is nicely showing how ASME's and ISO's approaches to dimensioning and tolerancing differ in general.
I believe the approach difference is a key to everything here. And I wouldn't even try to judge which one is correct and which is not. In fact, in my opinion, there are strong and weak points in each of them. And what we shouldn't do for sure is to arbitrarily assume that ISO standards (in this case 2768) are bunch of useless junk without any logic behind - they have been created by people with tremendous amount of experience and practical knowledge.
Here are some of my other thoughts:
I still do believe that ISO standards in general are oriented for 'functional design' even if some paragraphs may sound otherwise. The point is that ISO additionally pays a lot of attention to how the part is manufactured and even more to how it should be inspected. But is it wrong? I wouldn't say so. For me the functionality is not only a question whether something will assemble with something else. It is a matter of manufacturing abilities and economy too. One can have perfectly 'functional' assembly but the effort put on manufacturing and on the inspection will generate such a high price that at the end nobody will think of this product well. As usual, the compromise has to be found, and this is one of the purposes of 2768 standard - it is trying to tell that with this kind of tolerances a design can be economically optimized, adjusted to manufacturing and inspection abilities of a workshop.
But unfortunately this is a noble theory, nicely described in the annex A of both parts of 2768. The reality shows that 'general tolerances' concept is so general and broad that it had to be boiled down to some relatively simple cases and even with that it gets quite unclear. Example: take the general symmetry tolerance for instance - ISO 2768-2 is saying that: " The longer of the two features shall be taken as the datum; if the features are of equal nominal length, either may be taken as the datum." That is clear, but what if there were 3 features of different length shown nominally symmetrical? Which one should be chosen as the datum? Figure (b) in annex B5 is showing such a situation but not explaining how the third feature should be controlled. Should the two shorter features be controlled wrt the longest one or should there be two different datums for two positional callouts?
This was an example only - all I am just trying to say is that the standard is not perfect and leaves plenty room for assumption, but that is life. For some of us it can be useful, for some can't. I saw drawings of really complex parts with almost no geometrical tolerances shown but stating that general tolerances are according to ISO 2768. You would not even imagine how much time a product engineer spent on explaining to inspector which geometrical characteristics should be measured relative to which features. They finally found an agreement but only because they were working in the same plant and were speaking the same language, so they sat together with their bosses and clarified all the issues. Can you imagine what would happen if one was speaking American English, the second one Chinese English and they were located thousands miles apart?
And just for the end, despite of all shortcomings of ISO standards (not only 2768), I agree that they have one big advantage over Y14.5 and associated documents - they are way ahead in mathematical definition of inspection routines for geometrical tolerances. I fully respect and admire Y14.5 for its versatility in describing so different dimensioning and tolerancing schemes within one document, but the fact that those concepts are not fully supported by mathematical definitions is one of its biggest weaknesses.