"This is the most important thing. By far the worst failure mode is to put too much in a flashcard."
He's wrong on this one. The problem with making extremely atomic flashcards is that many times it's impossible to prevent slight amounts of overlap between the cards. What this means is that answering card A might contain information that allows you to answer some subsequent card B.
As a result you end up effectively getting a hint for some dependent cards, as opposed to if you had to recall all that information from scratch.
You can also make the related cards as siblings and use the bury feature so that you can only ever see one on a given day. I frequently use this to learn lists e.g.:
Card 1 front: Countries in the UK: 1. [...] 2. 3. 4.
Card 1 back: Countries in the UK: 1. England 2. Scotland 3. Wales 4. Northern Ireland
Card 2 front: Countries in the UK: 1. England 2. [...] 3. 4.
Card 2 back: Countries in the UK: 1. England 2. Scotland 3. Wales 4. Northern Ireland
Card 3 front: Countries in the UK: 1. 2. Scotland 3. [...] 4.
Card 3 back: Countries in the UK: 1. England 2. Scotland 3. Wales 4. Northern Ireland
Card 4 front: Countries in the UK: 1. 2. 3. Wales 4. [...]
Card 4 back: Countries in the UK: 1. England 2. Scotland 3. Wales 4. Northern Ireland
Because the cards are siblings, I'll only ever be tested on one in a given day. Each item in the list (aside from the first) is prompted by the preceding item, so that your brain learns to generate the entire list from memory sequentially. The same technique can be used to memorise a long quote by breaking it down into a list of chunks.
I also have a note type that consists of multiple cloze fields so that I can capture related information as siblings.
He's wrong on this one. The problem with making extremely atomic flashcards is that many times it's impossible to prevent slight amounts of overlap between the cards. What this means is that answering card A might contain information that allows you to answer some subsequent card B.
As a result you end up effectively getting a hint for some dependent cards, as opposed to if you had to recall all that information from scratch.