I thought this could bear repeating. For no truer words have been spoken.
"if we're honest, many welders never reference a WPS."
As I feel that a WPS is absolutely essential (stating this before some get their panties all in a wad), I have never been decided on exactly how. Welders are creatures of habit, creatures of the puddle, creatures of bead appearance, and arc stability. To put so much emphasis on the WPS, as if it were the Bible, as if welding just cannot happen without it, as so many engineering and auditing types seem to, seems to me to really put the cart before the horse to a certain extent. In my years in a fab shop welding I welded thousands of welds, literally thousands, and tens of thousends of diameter inches of pipe, maintaining around a 1% reject rate(with either 10% or 100% RT on everything), and never once looked at a WPS.
In a way, a WPS can be looked at as a reminder to experienced welders and a reference for inexperienced welders. What I mean by this is that a stable arc, a smooth puddle, good fusion and penetration as dictated by the welder in the PQR process is actually what determins a good weld. Not a piece of paper. The PQR is a record of that qual, and the WPS acts as instruction/reminder with broadened parameters. But we still shouldn't forget that it was an actual weld with an actual welder that gererated those parameters in the first place.
If you take a good welder and mess up his machine and then turn him loose on it, in seconds it will be back to where it should be. And this is where your WPS should be written.
I'm not saying that welders not looking at WPs's is good practice. I'm just arguing for a little perspective. The WPS doesn't make welding possible, it verifies and facilitates its consistency and communication.