great topic, my own exploring here has lead me to feel that for prone surfing in broken up waves the benefits are minimal, but I haven’t tried the latest masts (still on AFS UHM 80cm), so I’m interested to be proven wrong
Yes I think sacrifice is pretty real if you think that cost/performance/flex are all varyingly related, and gains on 1 of those points comes from either of the other 2.
If you ride bigger foils, marginal benefits on the slipperier masts I’d imagine. But if you ride small foils, huge opportunities.
The 19mm is not good in torsion, maybe it’s the doodad as said above. Here is a video illustrating the wobble the last time the topic came up