I really do appreciate the necessity of writing some kind of treatment before attempting to dive into a story. I made the mistake of not doing this in Screenwriting 2 with my sixty page script. I was essentially flying blind and the story took turns that I did not anticipate. I wrote myself into more than a few corners that were extremely hard to get out of while still doing the story and the characters some kind of justice.
That said, treatments also frustrate me. They are a necessary evil in my eyes, but they really make me pull my hair out. Sometimes I like to fly blind into a scene ad see what happens. I can always cut it or take the core of the scene and incorporate that. No matter how closely I follow a treatment, I always find myself deviating from it in some way because character information and plot drivers occur to me as I write. Also, I find myself using "sequence" a lot in the actual writing of my treatments. This is probably because I have not fully envisioned an important enough scene yet to put in that place.
Just the act of getting through the writing of a treatment helps to expose obvious plot holes and inconsistencies with characters.
Catching the obvious problems is what treatments are all about for me. They help save time down the road by avoiding all those blind corners. That being said, they are made to be abandoned the moment you find something better to write.
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