I'm not trying to talk you out of investigating, tweaking, experimenting. Our respective cartridges are different in several ways. I believe you have a great plan going forward. And I neglected to thank you for sharing what you have found regarding AS since using that better protractor.
The concept put forward in the white paper is that all of the adjustment parameters are inter-related. (Those aren't graphs of any data. They are just illustrations to help make this point.) This is something all of us who do their own setups and tweaking have experienced. This is because of the need to compensate for various forces in different planes acting on the cartridge. If one of these forces is removed due to better alignment, then why insist on applying the compensation needed when that force is present? The other parameters are still dependent on each other, but we have removed the need for one. As Nsgarch and I have suggested, (and he did a much better job in his post of 12/22), the better the stylus alignment the less friction there is and the less these side forces are. If they are still there at all. I believe that with the vastly improved alignment we are achieving that lateral force that AS is meant to address is gone or at least reduced to the point that AS is no longer necessary.
I suppose I'm coming around to thinking that Harry was right all along. (Imaging that! ;-) ) AS may well have evolved to compensate for the "close enough" setups that most dealers, and most of us, would settle for. Back when we we're all first being floored by the improvements realized with the better protractor, I believe Doug posted something about how we were now experiencing playback close to what linear arm users experience.
