about 90% of the whole world does, but ah well....
you'd be amazed about the use of "England" when continentals talk about what properly SHOULd be called the UK
old habits die hard!
perhaps the same thing is in order when people call citizens of the USA Americans, while forgetting that someone born in Canada, Honduras or Chile is also an "American"; America being a place from the Hudson Bay to Terra del Fuego (is this the right spelling? my Spanish is horrible)......
but then Us-ican doesn't sound like anything sensible, does it?
On Topic (again, SORRY!); how are the Zebra plecs faring in their tank, or do you still need to get a bunch?
about pH, don't forget that pH is NOT a linear scale like Gh or temperature....it's logarythmic.
wich means that a tank with pH 8 is 10 times (!) as alcalic as a tank with pH 7.....it multiplies by 10 every number up.....
and it also gets 10 times as acidic when counting down!
so say that Hypancistrus zebra lives at a pH of 5 (I dunno for sure, just example), then when you keep it at a pH of 8, it is kept at a 1000 times (!!!) more alcalic than it SHOULD be kept.
unlike temperature where 27'C is just 2 degrees too high for a fish preferring 25'C; it is in fact a miracle that many fish adapt to different pH.
it IS a given fact that fish often adapt to other pH, but when you try to breed them at a wrong pH the eggs fungus or the fry dies within days of hatching.
when seriously trying to breed a rare fish like the Zebra plec I'd say that pH is VERY important and tankfurniture should be less important.
otherwise you better just "plain" keep them, but forgo breeding attempts.
this to avoid a long time of disappointment following disappointment.
breeding tanks should be furnitured exactly or as closely as possible to ALL the "wishes" of the fish, NOT the "outside look" or other people's opinions on how a tank should be.
That's why succesful breeding tanks often look weird or crappy, with inert materials (PVC, terracotta pottery, slate etc), but in the filter are the materials wich control waterparameters (crushed shells for Rifttanks, Peatgranules for Blackwatertanks etc).
this because inert furniture can be cleaned and decontaminated easily and materials wich influence waterparameters often do best when placed in the filter instead of "omly" the substrate or so.
too many wars here 
