Welcome to the forum btw.
Sorry to come off as confrontational but have seen this sort of thing over and over on the forums where someone pops in and thinks their extensive experience with other-than-saws is going to disprove some commonly held principal of saw tuning/porting.
Might happen someday but so far zip...
We have many regulars here with a combined huge depth of performance tuning knowledge with about any type of power plant you can think of and I have to say it's rare that much of it ends up changing the way we do saws in a significant way.
All I can say is that I haven't had the same experience with octane vs performance, and for what it's worth I have dyno'ed a few saws.
I have a small airport up the road where I also get 100ll but use it mainly for it's stability in storage and hesitate to use it regularly due to the lead.
That and I don't like having the retune everything back and forth for pump gas and then the avgas.
What I'd like to try is a relatively new unleaded avgas, 93UL, but it's not available in very many locations, closest to me is almost a 3 hour round trip.
Seems to me the 661 in the tests should be to some extent advancing itself for max power...