Thanks for the in depth reply. I have to admit I wasn't being entirely serious when mentioning a consensus, but I had some of the initial reactions you mentioned. It all seemed a little overly complex, perhaps without a reason to be and assumed a level of technical design process that would perhaps be hard to support, without some sort of 'smoking gun'.
In any case I look forward to getting hold of the catalog and reading the paper in question. My interest is not primarily in European Medieval arms, but I have a fair bit of interest in the topic of the blade designs as much of what I collect does in fact have European blades from the 14th-18th centuries. Regardless, its great to see new ideas being proposed and its an intriguing theory.
How far back does the paper propose such a geometry based design process would have started?
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