Maybe it is best that it remains a mystery.

Anyway, wrt post 275 etc, the main point is someone formulated the hypothesis, and put it to the test, and appears to have refuted it.

That gives (at least) three logical possibilities:

(1) The planing hypothesis was successfully refuted.
(2) The planing hypothesis was wrongly, or too stringently, formulated, so what was being tested really wasn't the original hypothesis.
(3) The experiment wasn't done properly (for example, maybe putting the bike in the trainer prevents planing), not enough subjects, etc.

I do agree it would have been more compelling if someone who appears to have benefited from planing had been a test subject.

However, if you want to assert anything other than (1) at this point, the burden of "proof" is placed on the shoulders of whomever wants to save the hypothesis. I still think there might be something to it, but I am less enthusiastic about the idea than I was 4 days ago.

My initial interest was whether a bicycle that exhibits planing could become a non-planing or even anti-planing bicycle by changing something reproducibly (like an elastomer or isospeed coupler setting, or even the length of an inserted seat-post.)