Would Sapim Strong spokes 2.3 - 2.0 - 2.3 be advantageous?
No.
The issue is not strength. Strength is a much misunderstood concept so I'll approach it slowly.
If you use a hand winch to reel in your 10-ton boat from the water, you'll know that turning the crank is relatively easy. Strength is not required, just a bit of patience and some aerobic capacity. This is because the grearing in the winch does all the "strength" work for you. You are not strong. Park that.
If you take a piece of wire from a coat hanger and pull on it, you'll manage to pull the form out of shape somewhat. You can hook your foot in one end of the loop and pull on the other end of the loop until your biceps bulge, but you cannot break the wire. However, if you sit down and bend the wire repeatedly at the same place, you'll eventually break it. But you are still not strong. You simply exploited a loophole in the metal's strength called metal fatigue. To break something in metal fatigue is extremely easy, if a bit laborious. But, given some patience, you'll get there. If you have never broken a piece of coat hanger wire as a schoolboy, then you have not lived. Quickly go and catch up before reading further. You will not understand unless you've done this.
Now, imagine that same piece of wire being a bit thicker - say 20%. You'll instinctively know that it will be a bit more difficult to get it to bend but if you put your mind to it, you'll get there and eventually, weaken the metal and break it. You can carry on making the wire thicker and thicker up to a point where you can no longer bend it. No problem. Put the rod (thick piece of wire) in a vice, slip a piece of pipe over it and wiggle it forwards and backwards. Eventually it will break.
However, you still cannot break the wire, no matter how thin, in tension. By that I mean you cannot break it by pulling on it. We can say the wire is strong in tension, but weak in fatigue.
Back to spokes. Spokes break not from tension but from fatigue and just about always at the J-bend at the elbow. A break at the threaded end is somewhat different and we'll leave that for another discussion. The J-bend is our focus for now. What happens here is that each time a spoke is right at teh bottom of the wheel, it loses a bit of tension. This is because your weight is bearing down on it and it loses a bit of tension. It's like slackening a guitar string a little bit. It is still in tension if it can produce a tone but we know it is slacker when the tone goes down the scale. The same happens with a spoke each time a wheel turns with you on the bike - the bottom spoke loses a bit of tension. When this happens, the J-bend bends a bit. Just a little bit and definitely not as much as when you bent the coat hanger wire. With enough revolutions of the wheel, the bend area goes brittle, a crack develops and this quickly grows through the material and wham, the spoke breaks. I like to say it doesn't snap but have been called a pedant here for that description. To me, a snap would indicate a tensile (forceful pulling) break. Nevertheless, the spoke breaks in fatigue.
Back to thicker spokes. In order to prevent that cyclical bend in the J-bend, the spoke has to be very, very thick. Just a little bit of thickness such as that practically available to us, won't make much of a difference. Maybe 10 000 more revolutions of the wheel for each 0.1mm of extra thickness. 10k revolutions isn't much. Spokes last for millions and millions of revolutions.
Why thick-thin-thick spokes? Also called double-butted (actually swaged but that's another story) spokes, these spokes are thicker at the two ends and thinner in the middle. This thickness is not there to make the bend stronger, it is there to make the centre span weaker. Yes, weaker. With a weaker centre span, more of the flex is taken up by the straight (and therefore not vulnerable) thin section of the spoke. If you can absorb the flex in a smooth, straight section of the steel, the flexing force on the ends is reduced. This small feature alone adds millions of revolutions to spoke life. If you can now perform a bit of metallurgical magic to the spoke ends, you add even more revo's to the spoke life - to the tune of tens of millions. This magic is called stress relief. Stress relief in metal is a process whereby the crystalline structure is normalised. It is routinely used in manufacture, welding, cold forming etc etc. Stress relieving wheels is a wheelbuilder's secret. Although it is an open secret few builders understand it, hence the crappy wheels we read about here.
In summary, making the spokes thicker won't give any notable advantages and using spokes that are the same thickness throughout is downright stupid.
