Spoken like a gentleman. ... and you certainly seem to have your shit together. I'll admit much more so than I.You said and I quote, "Ever smoked some garbage that was over-nuted and not flushed before harvest?"
Let me explain. Flushing became a forum paradigm (do it because everyone does it) because the Dutch had/have a tendency to over feed their plants. Someone comes along with an idea that a plant is like a radiator such that you can open up a tap and voila, all those nasty salts are somehow washed out of the plant tissue and your sins are suddenly atoned for screwing up in the first place. Too late, the plant has broken down the salts into ions for starts, which have combined with C, O2, H and you know the rest..... I have pushed my plants with too much plant food, and noticed that indeed the single bud leaves/buds took on a hard, crispy feel, almost a gritty feel as opposed to a soft, cool feel. I'm not sure if that was not a situation where the salts (fertilizer) applied drew moisture from the buds or it is a collection of salts left in the tissue. (see my sig link).
Like I said in a previous post - do two samples, one "flushed" aka given pure water for a week or two and continue to fertilize the other plants judiciously until harvest.
Your call......
Riddle me this then UB, how do you explain weed that has a nice smoke and then the bio-nuclear weed that tastes like its just been washed down with Windex. I know you've smoked weed that had that strong chemical taste to it. It's awful!
Also I have found that there are varying degrees of this... By that I mean that at times I've had weed that had varying levels of the "chemical" taste ranging from "Nil" to "WTF! This blows!".
If I'm understanding what you're saying ....it's that if you over-feed your plants then you're fucked either way so don't worry about flushing because it won't help you. The only way to assure a good smoke in the end is to make SURE that the plants are not OVER-fed along the way and if fed properly won't need flushing in the end anyway as there won't be that build-up or shit that makes it taste bad.
If so, I say that your argument seems to make a lot of sense to me and if that is indeed the case I do stand corrected. However, I'd like to hear some other opinions on this. Thanks for the feedback.