Thanks for that stellar explanation, as well as the Petersen article. It took me all the way back to high school geometry (or was it middle school)?

I think I'm going to contact the companies to see what the stack and reach for their bikes are. It would probably be fun to calculate the stack and rise for each bike, but ultimately inaccurate. My main concern is the appropriate stack, especially since that is the value that isn't easily gleaned from published geometry specs, and since I'm not totally convinced that the reach is a more useful measurement of the effective top-tube (the steer tube to seat distance is probably more informative than the steer tube to an arbitrary point along the effective top tube line, which is pretty much determined by the seat tube angle).

Interestingly, with regards to the Petersen article, I noticed I liked the "new" longer TTeff from lowering the handlebars more than when it was more level (and thus with a shorter TT for all reasons listed on the forum so far).

BTW, for wheel sizes, this link has them tabulated http://www.bikecalc.com/wheel_size_math. I'm not sure how accurate they are, since I got a number that was slightly off when calculating a BB drop distance from wheel radius and BB height, then again the tire size wasn't listed on the manuf site, so I had to guess.