The most important thing to avoid such things is to make your question as good as possible. This means for lighting devices that you should include a datasheet with current and voltage, specify your mains voltage and frequency etc.
For ballasts, this is not always easy to find. They're also often designed to be 'user friendly' which means that the current/voltage is not always specified, only 'X watts'. When the input from the manufacturer is vague, the output from people who are trying to help will also be vague. Garbage in, garbage out. Vossloh Schwabe often prints the different compatible lamps including their running currents on the ballasts, which is awesome, but that's far from universal.
There are also different types of ballast. Over here, the most common one is a simple coil in series with the tube. Leakage transformers are very rare here. So that kind of stuff you also have to take into account to specify.
If everything is quite vague, it will take some discussing and potentially conflicting opinions before you get to a workable solution. That's the reality of online collaboration between different people. I've seen on many occasions people getting angry and moan at the people who are voluntarily trying to help them with electronics engineering and repair related questions and are discussing amongst themselves to figure out what's right. And to those i can only say:
Go find an engineering/consultancy firm, and specify that you only want one single answer and one answer only - even if that means that you might miss some important nuance.