Got my blocks back today, just sitting on our front porch for who know's how long?
Yay! Thanks Phaestus. I've been missing them.
Opened up and inspected the blocks. The "Storm" is a jetted block as I've hinted about this before. A significant number of the jets were clogged quite heavily with balls of lint, and especially over the central die area. The baseplate even had lint trapped in various places, which says to me that some of the jets were so clogged that there wasn't even enough flow to push the lint out of the way as there's plenty of room for it to escape once it reaches the base-plate.
The Cascade SS faired a lot better, with just a few outer (slower-speed) jets clogged mildly. The Cascade SS was tested second, so I have a feeling that the Storm already did the job of mostly filtering the test system. I don't believe that the SS's performance would've been impacted to any significant degree given what I saw.
I'll still run the "goop" tests, but right now I'm thinking that it was a filtering issue that explains the differences between Phaestus's and my own internal testing.
Sadly this is something that all these modern higher performance finely-structured blocks do suffer from. If the loop is open to the air for long enough, or perhaps refilled using dirty containers that introduce lint into the system, then this can be an issue. I'm sure what with Phaestus installing all manner of blocks all the time, that over time enough lint would've entered the system, whether from his own actions, or from lint/crap already present inside the previous tests blocks that were installed.