You are absolutely right that certain properly timed stress events can actually result in a higher final yield! What I want/hope to make clear is that stressing your plant whenever you feel like it, or accidentally at a random time during the grow, is not how you increase your yield with a stress event!
Beneficial stresses (when done perfectly) include: low-Nitrogen stress at the beginning of flowering to initiate floral growth more rapidly (DO NOT DO THIS IF YOU ARE GROWING FOR SEED), Drought stress at the start of flowering to initiate floral growth more rapidly, Cooler night time temps to decrease respiration and increase sugar content in the plant towards the end, nitrogen boosting at peak flowering without reaching the point of toxicity, and low-nutrient stressing the plants in the last week to encourage a pre-death final growth spurt.
It is easier to understand why some of these can actually be beneficial if you consider that a plants 1 and only main goal is to reproduce, and to do that, it wants to produce as much flower/fruit/seed as possible! For example, when the plant thinks it doesn't have enough water or nitrogen, it immediately tries to flower and reproduce before it thinks it is going to die, and if you water or fertilize at the perfect moment, when it is stressed, but not too much, you will start flowering much faster, saving a substantial amount of time in your grow period, without reducing yield, and sometimes increasing it!
The important thing I want to mention about plants grown in soil versus hydro is that either media you use, it is still the same plant, with the exact same physiology. . . which means that if stress is bad in one media, it is still bad in the other, almost guaranteed! Just because you can correct the problem faster in hydro, doesn't mean it wasn't a problem in the first place. The increased growth rate in hydro is caused by a more ideal growth environment for the roots (constant and complete water and nutrient availability), which means there is actually no increased growth rate if the roots are being stressed by any variable.
The plants defense mechanisms to stresses are almost always to shut down, or to slow down, what ever processes it can, until the stressor is fixed, and rarely (besides the times mentioned above) will its defense mechanisms be to actually increase growth rate.
You are correct when you say that stress is not nearly as damaging if you recover from it sooner rather than later, and having a perfect growing environment will always make that recovery faster and less stressful on the plant. I just get thrown off when your post reads like you are advocating for your not-100%-dialed feeding schedule (causes leaf burn), seemingly saying that it is actually better than a perfect feeding regime. . . ?
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...Enough with my long-winded technical critiques of your clearly-successful method and beautiful grow! I will now go back to my usual staring and drooling!!
-Meeks
