Thank you for putting together such a polite, well reasoned statement of your position. I reserve the right to disagree with parts of it :-), but I appreciate the dialogue.

You are correct, that Jobst Brandt's writings on the grease / no grease debate are the goto reference / explanation for the majority of us "greasers" :-) I never met him personally, but I find the majority of his positions to be fairly plausible from an engineering point of view. As a person, he strikes me as having been "difficult" to say the least. Unlike him, I really don't care to prove others wrong. I'm generally satisfied in explaining my position, and letting others take that as they may.

Regarding the recommendations of Sutherlands, Park Tools, Shimano, et al, where we differ is that I place less stock in their "institutional wisdom." Sadly, most people, including engineers, really don't critically analyze things they "know to be true". (I'm as guilty of this as anyone.) While modern day manufacturers are quite concerned with fatigue testing (Thank you, product liability lawyers), most of the lore regarding square tapers was firmly in place by the 1970's. Back then, bicycle and component manufacturing and design wasn't heavily engineered and tested the way cars, or particularly airplanes were. Most bicycle and component design was an iterative process. Build something that looked "good", then either beef it up if you had failures, or whittle stuff away until you did. (This is a perfectly valid, if slow way to achieve an optimal solution. Fancier, modern methods just get you close, faster.)

Jobst's conversations with engineers at crank manufacturers back in the day revealed their concern that initial over-tightening would lead to cracking of crank tapers. As far as I can tell, this was the original rationale for the "no grease" position. Without testing it myself, ideally over hundreds of cranks, I can't say if this is unfounded or not. Jan Heine's testing of one forged crank seems to point towards it not being a concern, at least on his high quality ones. Perhaps on earlier cranks, with lower quality alloys, this was a legitimate concern. I haven't cracked any tapers either, but that doesn't really prove anything.

The other issue the gets brought up frequently, is that pushing the tapers too far on to the crank will cause them to grow over time, eventually ruining the crank. In order for this to be a practical mechanism, the crank taper would have to deform in a plastic manner. For quality alloys, this doesn't seem to be the case. (Low quality, cast cranks may well be soft enough, but I suspect they might crack first, as most cast aluminum isn't very ductile.). In contrast to this concern, un-greased tapers commonly cause galling, and scoring of the taper surface during either installation or removal. I've seen several tapers that have been chewed up in this manner, resulting in large pockmarks and low spots that reduce the overall contact, and could well result in taper growth if installed too many times.

Lastly, and to add to what I said earlier in response to randyjawa's question: I am just about positive that Jobst was correct about the cranks squirming further up the spindle after some initial use. I have verified, as I'm sure you have too that a properly torqued crankarm, if checked again after a dozen miles will take another bit of rotation of the crank bolt to get it back to the earlier torque level. The only plausible explanations for this are either: a) the crank arm has moved slightly further up the spindle, reducing the tension on the crankbolt, or b) the crankbolt has loosened slightly. What makes b) seem unlikely, is that this mysterious loosening only happens in the first few miles, then doesn't proceed any further. I can't think of any mechanism that would let the bolt rotate several degrees initially, then stay put for any additional thousands of miles. This suggests very strongly that a) is indeed correct.