Or have I overlooked some major issue that would prevent this from being a viable simple file server solution?

While nothing prevents this method from working as a simple file server, it's not that much extra effort to get a better setup.

In Leopard, it's easy to add File Sharing-only users. In previous versions, the donation-ware Share Points makes it easy also.

With everybody logging in with the same account, you lose the ability to see exactly who made changes, or who has a particular file open. Excel and Word, for instance, in a standard file server setup, will tell you "Joe User" has a file open, and do you want to open read-only or be notified when it's available for writing?

I guess this hint would be OK in a very small setup, where all users can be trusted and won't ever leave. If it was a major hassle to set up additional user accounts, I'd see more value in this hint, but it literally just takes minutes with Leopard's built-in capabilities, or with Share Points in 10.4 or below. If the main impetus behind this hint is not worrying about maintaining permissions, you could just make all your share points read/write for everyone.

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The problem is that in the non-server version of Leopard (and maybe the previous OSs too) a file or folder created by a user will get the permissions rw-r--r--. This means that other users cannot write to a file crated by the owner even if they are in the same group. It is possible that Sharepoint can work around this but a non-altered Leopard will not. There are probably other workarounds but the hint was about a simple solution using an existing Leopard installation.

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