My guess is that Rex & Co. actually studied and watched the way the Bruce can land and observed the results he described in his post as opposed to theorizing about it.
I prefer a concave fluke design because by its very nature I believe it presents more resistance to being pulled than a convex fluke. The fact our Rocna can bring up a lot of bottom is irrelevant to me because what it's saying is that it dug in really, really well. We have a very powerful washdown system on our boat thanks to a previous owner so it makes no difference whatsoever how much mud the anchor brings up. Our old Bruce did exactly the same thing.
But regardless of the concave-convex argument, the rollbar anchors as a group present very obvious (to me anyway) advantages over the old drop-drag-and-hope designs. Particularly in the case of the Bruce which time and time again tests out near or at the bottom of the list in terms of holding power. I don't care how fast an anchor sets, if it doesn't hold reliably it's of no use to us whatsoever.
If it was just me saying this then I would say it's just me and is not at all representative of the anchor. But of the boaters I know personally who have or used to have Bruce anchors (and used them for more than just bow decoration) the majority of them have or had problems with them holding or staying put once they had set when they were subjected to higher loads.
If you have a big enough Bruce and a small enough or low-windage enough boat I suppose you could come to count on it. And there will be some bottoms it does better in than others. But as an all-around anchor it's a bad choice in my (and a lot of other people's) opinions.
We have been asked on occasion if we would be willing to sell our genuine Bruce anchor as they are no longer made. As I've mentioned, we use ours to prop open the shop door in the garage. We could do that with a brick. But we will not sell our anchor because we feel it would be irresponsible to pass on such an unreliable piece of hardware to anyone else.
Do I think the rollbar anchors are superior as all-around anchors to anything else out there right now? Absolutely. Do I think there are potentially better future designs possible? Absolutely. And if our rollbar anchor starts failing us the way our Bruce did would we replace it with something that worldwide testimonials declared was better? Absolutely. Would we replace it with an old anchor design with a proven track record of unreliability? Of course not.
Rex's final statement is spot on in my opinion. If you have an anchor that has proven in your anchoring situations to be reliable, then why change it? No sense fixing something that ain't broke. In our case, and in the case of too many people we have come to know here, our Bruce demonstrated time and again that it was "broke." So we went in search of a way to "fix" it, and the rollbar anchor has so proved to be the solution.
And just so we can visualize what Rex is talking about..... Might dig in, might not. Might just slide along, might not. Might dig itself in upside down, might not. Way too many "mights" for me.....
