Alan, I've been looking forward to meeting you at some point as I've been rather interested in your stropping posts.
From your descriptions it seems that effective stropping is a fairly delicate business, and I haven't really experimented with that. I've varied the strop and get different results depending on it.

I suspect that you have tried few strops (besides that piece of tire in the jungle), but may not have experimented that much as with your regular one. Have you had to modify the expectations for the feedback you're looking for depending on the strop?