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Q 8 4
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A Q 8 5
A K Q J 10 6
J 10 9 2 A 5 3
A K 9 8 7 Q 10 5 3
9 4 7 6 2
7 5 8 3 2
K 7 6
J 6 4 2
K J 10 3 Vul: No one
9 4 Opening lead: K of hearts

NorthEastSouthWest
1 ! Pass 1 Pass
2 Pass 2 ! Pass
3 Pass 3 Pass
6 Pass Pass Dbl
All pass ! Alerted
At the top of the scoring were two people in 6 diamonds making. At the bottom was one declarer in 6 clubs not making. You've got to get away from the mind-set that wants to make the strongest suit trump. If that's your only good suit, then of course. Make it trump. But if you have an adequate balanced suit, the chances are good that it will serve you better as trump than a solid unbalanced suit, on these grounds: you can sluff losers in a third suit (here spades, where you've got to lose two tricks against good defense) on an unbalanced suit and get subsequent ruffs, but you don't get any sluffs on a 4-4 balanced suit. Further, if your 4-4 suit has holes in it, while the unbalanced suit does not, you're going to have losers in that suit anyway so you don't escape them by making it a side suit and now lose the value of getting an extra trick in the suit by way of a ruff.
To be sure, this claim that "you're going to have losers in the suit anyway" isn't absolutely certain, for it's possible to have a third suit with winners that'll allow you to sluff some losers from a yukky balanced suit if not trump. But this is going to be rare. Also, if the 4-4 suit splits 4-1, you may find it difficult to get that ruff. But not necessarily. I have shown below how declarer could ruff two hearts (on a heart opening lead) before leading the first round of diamonds. So we're not talking absolute certainties here, but probabilities and likelihood. Much the same argument could be made from a different direction on major vs. minor hands. If you have a rather spotty 8-card spade suit and a powerful running club suit, those club tricks are going to count 30 points if the contract is spades (and the suit is adequate, though not powerful) and only 20 points in a club contract. So will the spade winners.
So it's an orientation you wanna steer clear of to insist on that solid suit when you have other possibilities to consider. Here there was even a preference shown for diamonds, a preference North blithely ignored at his cost.
As for the play of the hand, there are a few comments to be made. It's not such a laydown in a diamond contract as might appear. The first successful diamond bidder I looked at played it well, ruffing the opening heart lead (which just about everybody got) and immediately knocking out the A of spades. You must get that spade winner (in the bag or at least established) before drawing trump, because do you see what happens if you do not? You would then have no trump in dummy to capture a heart return!
And believe me, not all saw the danger there. The second successful declarer in 6 diamonds indeed did not. So how did he make? Well, there were several minutes while I was sure he'd made a spurious claim that the defense had accepted, and indeed, I think he was just lucky in the claim, for he couldn't know who had the A of spades. Anyway, here's what happened:
Ruff the opening lead and draw three rounds of trump. Yikes! Now he should go down. He ran six club winners on which East throws all his hearts! You go figure. He's saving his three spades! At trick 10, when declarer saw East's Q of hearts come down, he claimed! And he was right! Declarer would sluff a spade on that card, then lead a spade to develop his 12th trick!, East having nothing but a spade to return. But he made it only through East's carelessness and failure to see that a heart (of any size) was worth more than low spades.
Nor was this the only declarer to do so. One declarer actually went down in five diamonds. This declarer did almost the same thing. Ruff the opening lead, take three rounds of diamonds, and now instead simply running his clubs for 11 tricks (six clubs and five diamond winners, by virtue of the ruff, and he was only in five), this declarer was even more careless. He ran three rounds of clubs, led a spade to the K, which held. And now he has no entry back to the clubs! He led a spade to the Q, taken by the A, then lost two heart tricks to the defense before he was able to ruff a spade lead from West, and here's the corker: he won the last trick with the six of hearts, beating East's 5. That defender had just led the 10 of hearts to his partner's ace! It would have been down two in a five bid where slam was makable had East saved his 10 instead of his five.

Besides illustrating the value of a balanced suit for trump over an unbalanced -- and paying attention to a partner's preference bid -- the hand illustrates a not-too-rare proclivity I have commented on elsewhere, and that is to see a void as proof against losing a trick. Here both a couple of declarers and at least one defender seem to have fallen into that error. You can't ruff hearts in dummy when dummy has no more trump! Obvious? Well, perhaps to you, but clearly not so to some of the above people, notably the defender who saved low spades instead of hearts.
Counting was also amiss here. If you ruff a heart in dummy and then run trump, you've got five diamond winners, no? And six club winners. That's eleven. You're going to need another trick, and that should have been recognized very early. You might note that declarer doesn't need a spade winner if he gets a sixth diamond winner by way of ruffing a second heart. With the 9 of clubs and the solidity of the diamonds, that should not be too difficult. Ruff the opening lead, come to the 9 of clubs, ruff another heart, A of diamonds and now overtake the Q and run diamonds, then back to the clubs. That's six diamond winners and six club winners. Bingo. Either way. But you cannot hope to succeed if you try to set up a spade winner after dummy is exhausted of trump!

Oh, and there's one more item: one declarer did make an overtrick in five clubs. How do you garner 12 tricks in clubs? You do it when East hops up with the ace of spades on low from dummy. Second Hand Low (q.v.) please.
I can't explain South's two spade bids, the second one alerted. Indeed, when I came back to this hand after several years, the bidding was 180 degrees from what is shown above. But it hardly made sense that the hand with 2 clubs was insisting on a club contract. So I rotated the hands to reflect North's likelier insistence on clubs as trump. Nor do I know what North's alert of one club means. If they were playing Precision and that's a forcing opener showing 16+ hcp's and saying nothing about the club suit, you'd think his first "real" bid would be two clubs, not two diamonds. I dunno.