That's some frog-hair level lube tuning there, you got it nailed for that one. When I see having to cut back lube quantity to get groups or settle down the purge flyers, I still think something ain't right yet in a general sense, but no arguing that a certain combination can be outstanding. My 336 would cut five shots from 5/8" to under 1/2" at 100 just by shooting a few rounds lubed with one of the paraffin/soap/AG lubes and following it with one made with beeswax....but only for five shots, then the priming process had to be repeated. Something about CORE? Felix lube was picky in one of my rifle/bullet combinations, finally getting to the point I only lubed the space in front of the gas check. Less is more? All that led me to add the clause about lube not being sensitive to quantity applied to the bullet, or to lube groove style/shape/depth/number to the requirements of the Extreme Lube Quest. Felix lube with a tablespoon or two of Vaseline added seems much less sensitive to quantity applied than the original formula, and some of the other soap lubes which are "dry" don't seem to care, either....something which remains underlined in my mind. Magic Vaseline? It does good if its good, definitely a keeper ingredient. A few weeks ago I did some further research on industrial, non-USP petrolatums and found that even some of those products are reverse-engineered with purified fractions of microwax and paraffin oil, so no better than drugstore stuff. I maintain that we need a broad range of carbon chain lengths, not just two or three blended to an average, just as we found at the other end with the waxes.
Ester oils are very "solventy" and will even work through things like Buna-N seal material over time, so I'm not surprised that it took three days for the EVI to settle in.
VI? I took that and ran with it as far as I could go, from non-melting clay and high-VI oil lubes to Barry Darr's paraffin/Vaseline/STP formula, and much to my surprise I kept finding that waxes and plasticizing oils with LOW VI shot better (not counting the micro-additives like ester and castor) than the uber-high VI ingredients. That went hand-in-hand with thixotropic lubes, where rapid shear/work-softening and rapid heat softening both proved to be very desirable, if not essential, characteristics.
Temperature is still the biggie, it seems like we can make any number of super-accurate lubes that will work well in just about anything regardless of bore condition, bullet design, not be sensitive to bore condition or amount used, but once the temperature gets up over 90 degrees or way down near or below zero, things go south. I can fix the top end with Ivory and microwax, but the bottom end is still a bit of a mystery to me.
With this EVI formula I'm kinda having flashbacks to TnT lube, the Red Line two-cycle premix oil and Ivory soap. It was a really good lube for mild loads, and had the added benefit of being useful for pre-treating cleaned bores for elimination of first shot flyers. It left soap residue in rifle bores when the pressure and speed was pushed up, but that went away when I added some 180 microwax. Thirds wax, soap, and oil made a really good lube....but it had cold-barrel flyers like crazy, even showing up in revolvers at 25 yards. I added hBN powder to it and tried it in pistols again and it seemed to work just fine, but for some reason I gave up on it, probably because half the ingredients were there to fix problems with the other ingredients....that whole side-effect thing again.