[breatheoften]

That's a very interesting and well-done experiment! I definitely learned something -- and I buy the argument that there is a way to tie a figure 8 that makes it less likely or significantly less likely to be difficult to untie ...

But I think that as rope wears and as humidity goes up -- you'll still easily find situations where the knot was correctly tied but still a lot of effort to untie after load ...

And 12-18 seconds to untie is still a lot more time required than untie'ing the double bowline ... And he's showing figure 8 on a bite so he doesn't have to take the extra seconds to undo the figure 8 after ... that's not a huge deal but the double bowline is still imo easier to tie, faster to tie, and faster/more ergonomic to untie -- and also of course, harder to verify that it was tied safely by visual inspection ...