I've done both methods and documented growth on each along with watching and learning from some VERY highly skilled growers.
Picking off leaves as needed throughout will certainly lessen the stress the plants will go through but I noticed less explosive growth spurts vs doing a hard defol.
What most of the pro growers I've worked with do is to move fan leaves out of the way if they are impeding light and only cut them off a week or a little less before flower flip. One grower told me he does this to give the plant a chance to recover from the shock before the plant needs to concentrate its energy on flowering so I would imagine this is the same reason others do it. Obviously if there were fan leaves that were huge and blocking major bud sites they would get cut off but, for the most part, they were pretty judicious in removing leaves in Veg. When I worked for Jungle Boys in L.A. their defol rule of thumb was to lollipop everything 12" under the canopy and defol every other leaf in the sweet zone. They did this a week before flower flip. They were running
Gavita DE1000 Pro's for lighting so they had great canopy penetration.
Of course the other part of the equation is that they also start to phospho load a few days prior to defoliating to kick start the flower process. Not so much to make them toxic but certainly enough to push them hard. Once the plant recovered flower formation came on quickly for the first 3 weeks then just thickened and hardened while continuing to swell in size for the remainder.
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