Conventional wisdom and my goofy FSX setup

Back flying FSX after taking a year or so away from it, and I started from scratch with a new install. There's been some evolution of recommended tweaks, so I spent some time fiddling with the various options ranging from Bojote's configurator, to Paul Johnson's guide, Through every stage of the process, I made small changes and tracked the effect via benchmarks and in-flight experience.

And where I ended up seems to fly in the face of conventional wisdom. In short, the only way to maintain a good frame rate and smooth, stutter-free performance was to set FSX frame rate to unlimited and not use any of the inspector tweaks such as the FPS Limiter or 1/2 Vsync. In the config file, I've used the HIghmem tweak and the bufferpools=0 tweak, and that's it. This, combined with setting moderately aggressive antialiasing in Inspector gives me a solid 40-80 fps in default AC over Orbx PNW scenery along the I-5 corridor with Autogen on very dense. More than that, despite a frame rate that is a bit bouncy, it gives me completely stutter free performance instead of the usual chug-chug when looking out the side window at autogen or in sharp turns.

I have no idea why this is. In the past, Bjote's recommended tweaks worked very nicely for me, and setting FPS to unlimited would always result in a stutter-filled flight. I haven't changed my hardware. The only thing I can think of is that I am being more aggressive about pushing the video card via Inspector, and perhaps the CPU and Video card have reached a nice equilibrium. 

FSX is a very strange beast. Hopefully the current performance will sticky and I can do some flying instead of fiddling.