Well, if the consensus then is that .001" variance has no effect on adversely affecting a razors edge during honing, I'll live with that and chalk up my tribulations to my inexperience rather than being able to blame my lackluster results on the plates and hones

SRP member Sticky had mentioned in an recent post that the average thickness of a pencil mark is four billionths of an inch. With that in mind, aside from seeing where a hone is "out of the box", I see no need whatsoever to go through the trouble of ever doing a pencil grid for re-lapping a hone after the initial lapping. Why even bother taking the time to remove 4 billionths of an inch if a .001 variance has no ill effect? I ask this rhetorical question because I've used the pencil grid when re-lapping hones in the past. I'll do nothing more than some brief refresher passes on the diamond plates to clean the surfaces of my Norton 4000/8000 more than anything else and call it plenty good enough.