rich_g85 - I'm about to be a bit of a heretic. The Church of Stabilised Appoaches has many followers and like some other religions, you are not allowed to say you are not a believer or people will start shouting at you. This religion also has a few bibles and you find quite a few variations on a theme. You will also find that this religion is practiced in many ways. I'm probably in +TSRA's sect.
The basic guts of the thing is that a good landing comes from a good approach; which in turn will have been derived from a good intercept. But I digress. So returning, the powers that be have determined that stabilised approaches result in fewer poor landings. So when passing X height, speed, power, configuration, track, thrust etc. should be within certain tolerances and the before landing checklists performed.
And here is where the differences in religion come to play. Some wide bodied (ie. heavy) aircraft won't change speed or direction quickly. Some companies are so scared of an (another) incident they will place draconian, black and white limits on their crews. They then back this up with disciplinary measures if they find afterwards (using Flight Data Monitoring) that you have strayed from the path of richeousness. So these pilots might even go-around because a checklist has not be done by point X. You might also find matey boy in the next next to you drops you in it if you don't. Then we need to put in the scared, anxious and under-confident pilots. I know (too) many. They are constantly looking for things that are wrong or about to go wrong. You often find they are totally inflexible. And they have their alter-egos, the Cowboys. Then we have the short haul, multi-sector, flying every day guys vs the one or twice a month, 'what does this button do again?' types.
My personal sect belives that we should be more less stabilised by 500' on nice days and 1,000' on horrible ones. And on some disgusting days, 1,500' or maybe even 2,000'.
Sorry to witter on, but stabilised to one might not be stabilised to another.
PM