"Sorry, I know the Spitfire is hated here, as are the British by a lot of people"
That is a childish accusation. I don't know any such people on this BBS.
"Reginald Mitchell was a design genius and an experienced one at that by the time he penned the Spitfire."
There is not really nothing special about the Spitfire. It had a large wing which had to be designed and manufactured carefully to negate the effects of its size. The problem with such design was that it was not really suited for mass production and after all it did not really offer anything a simpler design could not have achieved as well. Of course the design is visually appealing and the Spitfire is possibly the most beautiful fighter of WW2, but it was not "magical" -if you get what I mean. It had its drawbacks as any other design and what bugs me is that in this kind of simulation it can utilize all its pros and none of its cons, or maybe one, the one you are trying to promote to be taken away.
What comes to flight testing the stall behavior was measured by cutting the throttle and pulling the a/c into a stall, from level flight, and recovered, and that's what was reported and that is how I tested it, power on and power off and it performs normally. IRL It was NOT pulled into a vertical climb, power cut, and made the aircraft fall prettythang first towards the ground! The results of such test do not surprise me at all. The point is, as I stated earlier, that the MAC may be prone of shifting forward if the flow direction is not what is supposed to be and it seems that is what happens in the tail slide, and that is mainly because of elliptic planform.
-C+