Maybe the Emacs developers knew what they were talking about after all. A couple of years I discovered that you can control the sequence of positions to which recenter-top-bottom will move the current line. As I wrote at the time, abo-abo recommended changing the default sequence from middle \(\to\) top \(\to\) bottom to top \(\to\) middle \(\to\) bottom. As abo abo said, if you believe in gravity that sequence is more logical and is also more convenient. That made perfect sense to me and I changed it in my config.
Lately, I’ve noticed that I almost always end up using Ctrl+l twice because—unless I’m looking at a function definition—I need to see what comes before the target line too. If I am looking at a function definition, Ctrl+Meta+l does just what I want.
Therefore, today I bowed to the developers’ wisdom and changed the recentering order back to the default.