Roy Smith wrote
Why the approach was designed the way it was, how the TERPS rules were
applied, etc.

This is well known locally. The approach was designed the way it was
to keep from interfering with Hobby operations. A North/South
approach would be guaranteed to interfere with Hobby, which is just a
few miles almost due North of LVJ. There used to be such an approach,
and it was decomissioned for that reason.

Maybe the approach really is broken and your pointing it out will get it
fixed. Maybe the tower is just charted in the wrong place and there's
really nothing wrong with the approach (I've see that before).

The approach is not broken. Bob Gardner was nice enough to send me
the appropriate excerpt from TERPS (thanks Bob - but why didn't you
just post it?) and the tower is just outside the secondary area, and
thus not a factor. I simply did not know that there was no
requirement for the protected area to be large enough to contain
allowed instrument error and maximum allowable (by the PTS) deviation.
Now I do.

The tower is charted correctly - I know where it is, there is nothing
to check.

I've found problems with charts and reported them. They get fixed.

Yes, I've had the same experience. However, those were actual
charting errors. This is not one of them. The error was on my part -
I did not know what the actual protected area was like, and assumed it
was larger than it really was.

It was a little over a year ago that I had a similar learning
experience. I discovered that when an approach is temporarily NOTAM'd
NA, the plate is not so noted, even if the approach is NA for years.
So you have current plates, a standard briefing with NOTAM's, and
unless you specifically ask for Class II NOTAM's, you will never know
the approach is not available until you ask for it. The long and the
short of it is that most IFR pilots are not aware of this (nobody at
my home field was) but that's the way the system works. This is more
of the same - the system is working as designed, but most pilots are
not aware that this is proper. I did an informal survey at my home
field, and none of the IFR pilots (including an airline captain and a
DE) knew about this. I wondered then how many more gotchas there were
in the system. I'm still wondering.

I am not far from deciding that the system is so full of gotchas that
GA IFR is simply not a reasonable thing to do.

Michael