Much to the dismay of your passengers 
I did the race commitee boat this past wednesday for the first time. It afforded me time to closely observe while waiting for the finish. We set up the course for the first mark upwind and from the west. After the first leg the wind picked up to about 10 knots, and shifted out of the south. This changed the course for the faster spinnaker fleet from an upwind downwind course to a reach. some of the boats switched to assymetrics, and some to genoas. The results were mixed with one of the genoas winning, but that was due to a good sailor I think
The assyms. were really screaming, and given a longer course wouild have caught up, probably. Mike, the local Northsail rep. says they are only about 168% approx., and are not much bigger than a 150 genoa, but, it's the deep shape that makes them work. He also said that we have to learn to fly a loose tack which adjusts back to the cockpit to really get that lift 
For me it's a lot to learn about these sails
At the same time the bowman clips the tack on and we haul the bowspit out. The bowman returns , clips on the halyard, and i begin hauling hand over hand. we sail off the wind on a reach until we pick up speed. As we get past 12 knots and head for 13 a sound vibration erupts from the daggerboard, and we are planing 
The skipper, Marty, heads more downwind until the speed starts to fall off, and then he comes back to a reach, and so on. Our course is like a wavy line, and he said it's always like this. When the wind builds we let out the tack line to put more space between the main and the spinnaker so it won;t blanket it. As the puffs died we took it back to about 3 ft. above the deck again. I don't want to make this sound too smooth. We broached three times, as we attempted to jibe and float the assym around the forestay. The mainsail got caught with a sticking block, and when we came onto the new heading we just got laid over, cpin and main in the water. That and a couple of strategy errors might have cost us the race. Fortunately nobody went overboard, and we always came back up It was a pretty stiff blow, but adrenalin was making it manageable. Mark, the trimmer liked to let it fly out there when we had the speed, and I or both of us would call seconds for puffs as they overcame us from behind. 5 seconds 4 seconds 3 seconds 2, 1 , The boat would go up on her rails, and then i would let the traveller to leward about 3 inches,(much like You and i have done Daniel,)as he let the assym sheet out. i blew a lot of commands, and just hope that they'll let me back sometime as this was a truly valuable lesson.
Glad you brought that up Daniel. 
It does make it seem like the important thing is the depth more than the exact shape, and geting some air under it?