[kickscondor]

I'd love to see more of a breakdown of the makeup of cryptics: what percentage of the answers involve anagrams, reversals, homonyms and so on? And how many clues encode the answer in pieces? Seems like a lot of puzzles use a composite of clues like that, with anagrams coming in second. Homonyms and reversals seem pretty rare. The "& lit" type clue is almost never present.

But I wonder: are there regional differences? Have certain types of clues fallen out of favor over time? Can I follow puzzlemakers that shoot for more variety?

[dave2000]

One type of clue that's fallen out of favour, according to a book I read about it a while back, are those which require knowledge of, for example, the classics. It used to be that you needed a pretty good private education, but as English speaking has become more international, and as fewer and fewer English speakers (as a percentage) have that sort of education, those clues are less likely to be useful.

Different setters take different approaches; it's why the papers almost almost name the setters, and why it's a big deal when one retires as they're sort of unique.

[zem]

poking around http://www.fifteensquared.net/ is one way to do a quick (manual) survey - you can focus on specific setters or papers, and count the clue types from the annotations without needing to sit and solve them all.