I agree that spin seems to be taboo these days. I'm not sure if it's because of the spin and throw crowd or if it was over emphasized back in the day.
I also agree that leveraging the disc at the correct moment creates spin by changing the angular momentum of the disc and creating torque. I think this is important because the torque increases gyroscopic stability and prevents the disc from precessing which allows the disc to fly like a wing for a longer period. (Disclaimer: I could be mistaken about the science as my background is not in physics).
I think these ideas are important to discuss not only so we have a better understanding of the swing and disc flight, but because they can help us understand why it's important to leverage the disc at the right time.
Anecdotally, I've had a very hard time fixing my strong arming habit. Thinking about putting spin on the disc, feeling the "hit", and improving "snap" have helped me to start putting emphasis in the right spots.
I'm not trying to argue that our technique is wrong, but maybe we don't fully understand why it works and which parts need to be emphasized.
It's been useful to compare our throw to other sports: swinging a bat, club, machete, etc. , or throwing a ball. To me, there is one major difference between swinging/throwing in other sports and the disc golf swing. Our object has to have angular momentum as well as linear momentum to fly - a disc needs to spin.
Spin helps with high speed stability. The gyroscopic flight is important to the disc flying to its numbers as well as the angle of attack. This helps it resist forces such as wind or the stability of the disc based on its wing shape and how the wind pushes on the disc.
We know what a gyroscope does, and we have the wheel demonstrations.
But the argument I got into was spin and stability, and I got called an idiot, because the spin you can put on the disc greatly effects... affects. Afffects, greatly affects the ability of the disc to hold angles.
Which is why a lot of strong arm throwers who are not pushing energy into the kenetic chain don't get the spin and they get a stall at apex vs a push at apex. the disc is not able keep the angles.
This is probably also why simon can throw shots that seem like they should come right back at him, but instead of stalling and pushing back, they stall and push forward. It's.. annoying. I hate/love you simon.
While the wind tunnel, when i complete it, will give us a TON of data on the wing and how nose angle changes the flight, it cannot really give us data on the spin of the disc changing that.
I'm forgetting a few terms in here I really want to use, but. I digress I'll have to ignore them for the moment as .. brain malfunctioning.
As there isn't really a great way to gather data on the spin of a disc to its flight dynamics, we have to make assumptions and theories until we have a machine that can throw frisbees correctly.
I got it drawn up in my head and how to do it, but there are some engineering parts to it that are a bit to advanced for me and I'm not able to get ahold of the youtubers I really need help from with this who actively do this stuff and have posted video's with similiar machiens for others sports.
But when we have that, we can measure the rotational speed from a control from high speed over head, and then stand in a few throwers of various skill levels with the same discs and see the spin differences then get more accurate measurements of flight dynamics from the disc.
Because what disc golf kind of needs for some standardization of flight numbers is a control, which there is 0 control.
The stability of discs have a lot to do with the archer, not the arrow.
Then there is the issues with poor molding and cooling processes making such dynamic changes in the wing shape on the discs causing different flights.
Which thats a whole different topic.