Towards a rational definition of brick walls in genealogy

In two of my previous posts, I have discussed aspects of the situation commonly referred to by genealogists as hitting a "brick wall." See Records you may not even know exist and A return to the "brick wall" issue. It occurs to me that the term is really so vague as to be useless and as I pointed out, the concept of being unable to continue with research is a fallacy. If there are no more records, then that is not a brick wall situation, it is an end of the line. To illustrate my point about the nature of the brick wall concept, I refer to an article from 19 October 2007 written for the Ancestry Daily News by George G. Morgan. The article is intended to explain a method of building a research plan once brick wall issue had been resolved. Quoting from the article,
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