In reply to Nutty:
Hi Nutty,
Whilst I don't appreciate my comments being thrown back at me as 'statements' (this is a conversation on a climbing forum, not a police investigation), the point you have is an interesting one regarding why I drew the parallel this time, but hadn't done previously.
Were I to go back and re-write those reviews, maybe I would approach things differently, but the reason I didn't (rightly or wrongly) was twofold: firstly, because the difference is quite subtle and secondly, because it's very hard to be objective. Perhaps I over-egged it when I said 'nowhere near', but forgive me for a bit of hyperbole - these reviews can be very dry without a bit of character injected into them!!
To demonstrate just how subtle the differences can be, and the reason I historically refrained from drawing too many comparisons, take a look at XS Grip vs. XS Grip 2. Thus far we've focussed on the former, but the latter is supposedly superior, but is it actually? I'm sure that Vibram would have some stats, and I'm sure those stats would say that it's better, but in use - can you really tell?! I doubt you could, and if you did would you ever be able to write it off as anything but bias brought about by the fact that you believed it to be better?
The difference between Zenith Quattro and Zenith Pro 2.0 was actually much more obvious, which is why I explicitly commented, compared and contextualised their performance within both the Beta/Beta Eco and Crux/Crux Lace reviews.
In the future I'd anticipate doing something similar. Draw parallels where I can, as it is useful to know, but with a strongly worded caveat that it is often much more subtle than the difference between Quattro and Zenith Pro 2.0.
At the end of the day, it's a review - not a lab test.