Randy,
I agree with you to a very large degree. I remember well once I had made some offhand remark about Howard Rush simply "copying" winning setups (I think he had an Impact?) and he said specifically, that was exactly what he was doing, in order to quickly get to a competitive level. It's a sort of wisdom, there are good reasons why certain (often simple, if imperfect in the purest sense) features of our models have persisted. They work!
If a person were truly determined to be a competitive stunt jock, he would invest most of his time and effort practicing (once he had the established quality equipment) and flying contests. Simply, we're not likely to conquer stunt with some novel equipment feature, at least not in itself. I'm not meaning to preclude the contributions innovations have made to stunt, everything from foam wings, molded balsa sheeting, engine mount crutches, uniflo and clunk fuel tanks, 4" bellcranks and longer control horn arms, arrowshaft control rods, adjustable leadouts, removable gear, take apart ships, backwards bellcranks, wiggly rudders, longer tail moments, weight boxes, molded fiberglass and CF parts, piped engines, miniature synchronous electric motors, LiPo batteries and solid state controllers, pusher props, and a dozen other things that didn't just fly into my head this moment.
And most of us "know" many of the handful of innovators - they are/were serious competition flyers. Of course innovation is important.
In the case of exponential controls, I personally felt {once I got used to it} it made my model easier to fly. If not already clear, however, I want to assure everyone I'm not promoting expocranks. I have no personal interest in producing and/or selling them! I'm not a competitor, I'll use them on my models {as canted bellcrank and 7-degree neutral offset flap horn setups} to satisfy my own interests.
I'll gladly share information and ideas about expocranks, but I believe it foolish to regard them as magic bullets.
L.
"The innovator is not an opponent of the old, but a proponent of the new." -Lyle E. Schaller