Good, love the insight. My stoker is 145 pounds and very smooth. for many months before we even had our tandem she was riding rollers and is much more competent at it than I am. Also working with a coach smoothed out her pedaling stroke and she delivers power much more evenly than I do. But we are a 345 pound team. I rarely notice her moving around back there until I make some smart comment about workload or some such nonsense. We prefer the handling we got when swapping forks. The 'Dale fatty is a very stiff fork and offers little trail the Winwood not so stiff and a lot more trail after the first few jittery miles everything smoothed out and we did not even notice the handling because it was so much the same as our single bikes. Now that I just wrote the last couple of sentences, I think it I should have said I was the one who preferred this type of geometry. I am not really sure my stoker cares oone way or another.
With regard to my comment on geometry preference, you indirectly answered it. I was totally ignoring availability. You tend to ride what is available in your area. So if an LBS is heavily invested in Santana, you ride and become familiar wih Santana, same for Co-Motion, etc. Without having something to compare to you 'settle' (not the best word but the one that sprang to mind first) for whatever is available in your area. It certainly isn't like single bikes. In our area, and I am just up I85 from your area, you would be hardpressed to find more than one or two tandems in stock in the entire area. The Charlotte metro area is over 1M people. The test ride type of comparison is very difficult to do here (I am not a fan of test rides for other reasons I will not delve into here). You have to rely on past experience whether that be tandem or single to understand what to expect.
I took no offense nor did it occur to me that you were being a smart-ass. Remeber I mostly post in Road Cycling and if you don't have a tough skin, or simply take no notice of anything considered offensive you certainly wouldn't last long in that particular forum.