Sean -- I should first say that I really enjoy your reviews and my gripes, if they are even that, weren't directed at your work in particular. To answer your question, your resolution and CA tests are really very clear to me, and I didn't mean to refer to the 75/90 tests in particular. The OOF tests I find a bit hard to follow sometimes, because I have to scroll up and down to refer to different lenses in a test, and sometimes I can't fit them all within the window, and so forth. I am guessing that the Flash interface is something you use for security purposes, but I do so often wish I could pull up two lenses of my choice and compare them side by side or fill my screen with them. I suppose I could do this manually with two Reid Review windows. Seeing both the full-cropped view of an image with artistic merit (not just a test subject) and a detail view (for getting a sense of print viewing) is a bit hard to do, for me anyway. I'm not necessarily hoping for OOF tests in color, and perhaps that comment was misleading in my original post. I do think that the rendering of OOF color contrast looks different than B&W contrast, and sometimes that's useful to see.
Really, what I find myself wishing for is an easier way to compare the rendering style of different lenses, using both samples and opinions. Right now, the best way seems to be slogging through samples in Flickr pools. Reading opinions on this board and others usually amounts either to a litany of decontextualized "X is the best" type comments or a kind of throwing up of the hands of the "depends on your preference" variety.
I don't know that I really have a suggestion here. I'm well aware that rendering style is such a matter of personal preference, it's hard to describe in prose form. I just find that I have a hard time getting a feel for the differences in rendering between different optics and I wish I felt like I had a better handle on that factor as I consider which ones are more and less useful for my purposes. Maybe what would help is more discussion of the particular rendering characteristics of different lenses, with samples to support such claims. But even that might be such a subjective thing as to be impossible.
Does any of this make any sense?
