Myron--
Yeah, I thought so. Thank you for the link, it was very entertaining. I thought you showed great patience+knowledge in your counter arguments, but I don't think you got anywhere with that guy. As Matt alludes, there are a handful of people out there nursing their own (worn-out) agendas, and they all sing in unison: there's some unverifiable gripe about MC, although most of them still use MC.
Mike, I think the test that you conducted is the only test that matters, although my results differed from yours.
FWIW, people who prefer ASIO seem to credit aspects of coloring and staging, which doesn't make sense to me. I would have to believe that the apparent difference would present itself in granularity, or not at all. To me, ASIO seems like a clumsier playback process, and if I can't hear the difference, I'm not going to fork over the CPU cycles.