Here is an Idea

Ham I think that you (or anyone else with a high quality swing) could do a simple experiment to shed some light on this one. I am assuming that you have a launch monitor but if not you could do this hitting into a green.

So, my idea is that you hit balls with a wedge using the launch monitor to determine spin and find out what happens if you hit balls off of a tee compared to hitting off of a normal lie and off of some sort of tight lie.

My guess is that you can change the amount of spin when hitting off of the tee from very high to low just by adjusting your swing a bit.

Hopefully this testing could be considered fairly un-biased as you have indicated that you are neutral in this discussion...

Regards, Herbert