No, not at all. I've spent a large amount of my life marking / grading / binning , lots of papers, theses, dissertations and the like. These have been at all levels, from G.C.S.E. projects right up to PhD level theses. Most of them (although academically robust, and adequate to fulfil the requirements of the author's goal) tend to be trying to prove black can be white (given the right conditions), or that you can see from the data contained in the submission, that you can dangle an elephant from a cliff, by a blade of grass, or that a bumble bee cannot possibly ever fly.Try telling the elephant / bumble bee that. Point being, it's very easy to prove a hypothesis, if you control the conditions to favour the required outcome. Getting back to the flat versus clipless argument. The proof of the pudding is very much in the eating. If the differences were only marginal, experience would provide data, that could be used by pro cycling teams, to allow them to do away with the far more complex, and expensive clipless systems. They don't, what does that tell us? Shimano developed the SPD system for a reason.