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Extinction, the elephant in the room that hinders optical Galactic observations

Extinction is the elephant in the room that almost everyone tries to avoid when analyzing optical/IR data: astronomers tend to find a quick fix for it that the referee will accept, but that does not mean such a solution is correct or even optimal. In this contribution I address three important issues related to extinction that are commonly ignored and present current and future solutions for them: [1] Extinction produces non-linear photometric effects, [2] the extinction law changes between sightlines, and [3] not all families of extinction laws have the same accuracy.