Relative Importance of Analog Components

No doubt I ought not say it, but I would rather you analysed (UK English) or analyzed (American English) the thread. If you want to analize anything, please do it in your own time and in privacy with consenting adults.

But to address the meaning of your comment:

which analog audio link could damage the more the cartridge signal?

Yes, this is a valid question, but it makes a presupposition, which is that the signal from the cartridge is sacrosanct and can only be damaged downstream. I am not suggesting that signal can be improved downstream, which is nonsense. Maybe 'harm reduction' at the very best. Let us assume the TT does its best, as does the tonearm. Then the signal comes out of the cartridge as pure as it can be from those three items working at their peak. Only the phono stage can screw things up after that (yes, so can everything else downstream, but that is out of our remit here).

My suggestion is that the quality of that signal from the cartridge is the most important thing in the chain of reproduction, all other things being equal, ie you don't substitute a rotten tonearm etc.

There you go @dogberry, The one thing that can f-ck up a cartridge more than anything else is a bad tonearm. I think there would be less variation between reasonably decent phono stages. However I also believe the most important part of the chain is the Speaker/Room. There can be a vast difference even between set ups that could be considered reasonably high performance. 

Well I'm of the opinion that the phono stage can make more difference than the tonearm. I'm not going beyond the analog-only chain here, so pre-amp, power amp and speakers are out of consideration.

Perhaps I should have thought of a better way of phrasing my question, or maybe reduced it to two-way comparisons (TT or tonearm, cartridge or phono stage, and arranged successive comparisons until I had an aggregate answer).

The devil is in the details like "less variation between reasonably decent phono stages". Reasonably decent? If I had the means I could probably assemble a dozen $5000 phono stages and I bet you wouldn't say they were all reasonably decent - you'd quickly say which you liked the most and why. So we cannot pretend that all phono stages are so alike as to make nearly no difference. Perhaps the best way to state my position is that cartridges' sound ouputs vary more than tonearms' sound outputs vary and so on.