I think there is some overstatement by your US guru, Deejay. His talk of heating of edges, rapid blade wear, and overloading of drivelines - for a contact so light that you can spin the reel with your fingers - is in my opinion sheer nonsense. I agree with his conclusion - a set of perfect edges with not-quite contact is even better than a set of perfect edges with minuscule contact - but it seems to me that by employing so much exaggeration he weakened his case. That aside, I think your own explanation of the issues above is the best that I have seen. It is probably the first time we have fully agreed on this subject. A scythe does not need a fixed blade to make a perfect cut, but I don't think you can duplicate its effect with a reel mower because it only works well if the grass is at least a foot long, so that the grass above the cutting edge has a substantial amount of inertia. However the combination of the pushing action of a fast-moving scythe, with a really sharp stationary blade, can work beautifully if you also have so little clearance between the scythe and the fixed blade that the grass can't fit in between the two. Then most of it is cut by the inertia-of-the-grass principle that the scythe uses, and the remainder gets cut anyway by the lack of room between the fixed and moving blades.
The key point here is that if you can hear metal to metal contact when you rotate the reel slowly by hand, the reel is touching far too heavily under either the contact or non-contact method.
