The standard hours given to people to grow canabis eg 18/6 veg and 12/12 flower were designed to give best production, quicker cycles and more managble plants all balanced out against each other to get the best we can indoors. It can be tweaked but the comon method is ussualy the easiest to follow to get something good out the plant with out messing with it internaly too much.
(Hope that make sense and helps, i tried to explain best i could)
That made perfect sense and you explained it great!
Back in the Jurassic period, I did something similar and gradually cut back the amount of daylight hours to lengthen the growth cycle and extend the flowering period, in order to de-Dutch some seeds I got from Sensi.
Haven't done it since then because there's really no need to. Influorescence is a hormonal response to decreased light and I want to get the flowering hormones going as quick as possible. The only thing that will happen if you gradually decrease the light is it, will take longer to be able to sex the plants.