> Expertise is directly proportional to dollar value of equipment destroyed in the learning process." B-)
LOL, in that case I *do* qualify as expert ! You really don't want to know. Or maybe you do but I'm not telling 
In the same vein, you get what you pay for.
If anybody *really* want expert advice then go hire one, at $75 per hour or more you'l l get what you pay for. And a liability insurance and fully qualified statement to boot. *FREE* advice in a forum like this will - no matter how well everybody tries to do your homework for you - still be at best an educated guess.
Most of the data presented here are empirically collected, which have a lot of validity, no debating that. Some excellent rules of thumb can be - and have been - extrapolated from these figures and they can be used to make an educated guess about results in a slightly different situation. But sampling+trial and error and engineering are different branches of the same tree and you need an awful lot of datapoints to be able to extrapolate to some totally new situation. Or an engineering degree
Also, a real expert would probably object to you stacking the deck up front about the answer you will get, you can ask for expert advice only if you are prepared to let go and take whatever you will be told. If not you then you claim to already have the expertise anyway, so why bother asking the question in the first place... a real expert would not take kindly to you telling him/her how to solve the problem that you are dropping in their lap.
Case in point here is a local welder. The guy is literally God in welding, retired but still going strong. They used to fly him all over the province to do the impossible. The one way to piss him off is to bring him something that's broken and tell him how to fix it. If you're that good go fix it yourself is the only answer he will give you, and you can take your stuff with you.
