Do normal people today really read a book and say it "seems so workable"? [My italics.] That just sounds like a strange expression to me. Hubbard evidently wrote as though it were the most ordinary thing in the world to praise something by calling it 'workable', but I really don't think I've heard the word used very much. I might say, "a workable solution", maybe "a workable idea". But to me there's a nuance that means that the word "workable" isn't applicable all that often.
An established method that you can apply off-the-shelf is never 'workable', for me. It just works. It's time-tested. Even if it's not idiot-proof, even if you have to use it properly in order to get it to work, still the proper use has been clearly established. When you talk about the method, you mean the method properly used, and that just works. There's no "-able" about it. It works.
To me, calling something 'workable' implies not only that you can get it to work, but also that you have to actively make it work. It won't just work automatically. You need to keep watching it, and regularly improvising new tweaks in order to keep it working. It can work, but only if you make it work. A jury-rigged contraption that is prone to fall apart in a dozen different ways could be workable. If it really wasn't all that hard to keep the thing running — if a kid could do it, say — I might go as far as saying "very workable".
But I would never say "so workable". That's like saying "so potentially adequate". "Workable" just does not go with "so", to my ear for the English language. It sounds silly. I could only say it with a smirk, as a joke.
Am I just being peculiar, here? Or is "it seems so workable" an Scn tell, the way it sounds to me — something that only an indoctrinated Scientologist would ever say? Or could somebody conceivably have picked up the usage just from reading a couple of Hubbard's books?
My guess, by the way, is that Hubbard himself actually understood the word 'workable' in my way, and that's why he used it: because none of his methods every really worked automatically, despite all his insistence on the effectiveness of 'standard tech'. I'm guessing that, at best, they could sometimes be made to work, often with a lot of nursing and babysitting. But then Hubbard noticed that if he just kept repeating 'workable' or 'uniformly workable' as though it meant a reliable technology, he could impress people without actually committing himself to very much. Like marketing a health nostrum with a big, flashy label saying "presumed innocuous", instead of promising any positive benefits.