Interesting question. When I first got boogie and was spending alot of time on crested gecko forums the advice was not to feed bugs as more than an occasional treat because the CGD was a formulated, complete diet. The thinking was that if you were feeding anything additional regularly than you were unbalancing the diet. I do not feed bugs almost at all and obviously boogie is quite old so it seems to be working fine.
When she says that the bigs aren't as 'healthy' as the bugs we feed she is basically making the core argument against feeding bugs. The reason all the best breeder advice was to only feed cgd was because we cannot mimic the variety they would get in the wild ourselves but cgd is carefully formulated to meet their actual dietary requirements. Also most of our feeder bugs tend to be higher in fat and lower in various trace minerals than wild bugs would be.
That being said I was just looking at the pangea crestie forum, which used to be THE forum for crestie care and breeding and alot of people were talking about feeding bugs in a more serious way. I dont really trust those folks because I do not know them that well and honestly it seems like the forum has gone downhill, it only has a general CG chat where there used to be a different forum for every subject.
Based on everything I know you shouldn't feed bugs on the regs but it seems like folks are having success with that method. My style of best practices is kind of a 'whatever works' thing. Hope that helps.
Ps I dont have any ball pythons! I have always wanted one but dont think I'll be getting on anytime soon since I decided to get a parrotlet instead.
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