Shazaam! you are the font of all knowledge! One day I too hope to be able to write with such a well-informed opinion.
As an aside to the (well-documented) technological constraints, it's well known that different manfacturers use very different profiles, providing different shape contact patches dependent on angle of dangle. I loved Dragons, and now love Diablos, but never realised how different they were to, say, Dunlops until I saw them alongside each other on a rack. Seeing that made me deliberately go for a higher profile front to help the bike drop in better (it can sometimes be like wrestling Pablo Escobar's rottweiller...).
I also thoroughly agree that there's a million other variables involved at any given moment, from your suspension to whether you had Guiness or John Smiths the night before ('cos you've got have one or t'other
).
In order to sort things out on the suspension front I'd recommend we persuade (with cash) a suspension guru to attend the next TA. We could split the cost between a bunch of us and get some meaningful improvements to our respective bike setups.
Cheers,
Ali