TomD
It's like we need to colour code these responses to determine what plane we are talking about. And what paradigm. Stanley plane allows one to set it up as a smoother, or make it a jack. Adding weight to the thin blade may not be a placebo effect if one is taking honking cuts across the grain with the blade hanging way out. The stanley lever cap is a pretty poor device for actually clamping the blade in place. No early user would have paid what we pay to gain such a small increment in improvement. I wouldn't call it a placebo effect, but I would say that there aren't any points in it. No more greenbacks at the end of the day.

Many early users may have hated their tools and had no interest in them after the workday was over.

Another thing that is part of our obsessive analysis is that we are looking for problems that exist in the tools. At the most practical level we should be looking for problems that exist in the results. But we obsessively analyze the tools. It is dead easy to find things to fix, but they aren't necessarily going to make any difference to the results. Over time this can completely lift a product to a different level, but you have to suspend disbelief for a while to let the changes sink in. Think of something like the AR-15, or the 1911. There isn't a part that hasn't been reshaped four ways to sunday, some of the ideas don't last, but after 50 years of this we have raised somewhat flawed systems to a whole other level. Not the level of the mini-gun, but a totally different level of execution in the original product. Unfortunately this does work best when there is an iconic tool that has mass appeal to start with.