Barry - Thanks for the detailed explanation.
Further to this:
1. Different vertical/horizontal mass - Vic points out the frequencies you mention, on his site, but states that the air bearing does not respond in the text book fashion. As he's the owner and designer, I'm always going to take statements like that with a grain of salt. But it does seem to translate into real world results. There are some great independent reviews of the arm and I can't see that happening if there was a major flaw in the basic physics, it just wouldn't sound right, or good enough to be labelled giant killer, capable of going head to head with pivot arms 3 to 4 times the price. I wouldn't attempt to defend any of that, as it is way beyond my experience, but all the claims Vic makes do seem to show through. You mention Decca cartridges as a particular mismatch problem, yet Vic's cartridge of choice is a Decca Reference. As for foot fall, I had my TT at Scalford last Month, on a £5 Ikea table, in a first floor room with a creaky wooden floor and a door/closer that kept crashing shut every time someone came in. I could feel the door and foot steps through my feet all day and it never skipped or showed any kind of distortion, till I knocked the table of course, which I did a couple of times.
2. Scrub flutter - Yes I would agree that the vertical angle of lift on a short arm will be greater as it goes over a hump in the record. So the cartridge will start to complain earlier than if on a longer arm. But it will have to be a hell of a hump and my cartridge usually bottoms out on the hump before this happens.
3. Cartridge Wires - I actually use unshielded silver wire 700mm long from the cartridge tags straight to my Phono stage inputs and get zero hum. If it was a problem, the options I mentioned are available. But there is little pollution from other cables/boxes if your TT is up on top, away from the other gear. Yes, the wires need dressing to avoid drag, but that is also the case on pivoting arms, some designs are more prone than others. I very briefly owned a uni-pivot that was very twitchy in this respect.
4. Pump Pipe - It's only 3.5m away through a double brick wall so no noise, or major pressure drop. I've used the pump with 6m of tube on the lowest setting without issue, which is only about 10/15% of its full output, so plenty in reserve. Having to work around the pump noise, is a compromise, but even when installed in the listening room, the pump is drowned out by the noise from my fridge in the kitchen breaking through, as my listening position is level with the door and in line of site of the fridge, a definite compromise.
It works for me, but won't suit everyone. The set up is different, rather than harder and something you get better at with practise. A guy cornered me at Scalford and asked how I managed to set it up, he said it was so well behaved. He had tried and tried but never got his working properly and ended up selling it. After seeing mine operate, he was regretting that and wished he had persevered. After listening to how he was going about it, I wasn't surprised it wouldn't perform, he was doing his own thing and ignoring the instructions. I can set mine up from scratch with a new cartridge in 15/20min, which is quicker than I could sort my stock Technics SL-1200. I spend longer fine tuning the VTA and Phono Stage loading, but it is pretty close from the start and I can adjust both of those on the fly fairly quickly, till I find the sweet spot.