PCRCCW,
No need to apologize. A lot of this stuff is voodoo or rocket science depending on your perspective. Getting the experience to match up with the physics is hard.
What I liked about that thread on Glocktalk is that a consummate shooting expert with little formal physics/engineering knowledge and the professional math/physics/materials guy started off disagreeing, only to come to agreement after much detail and different effects were discussed.
The info may be correct..but find it hard to grasp or believe parts of it..the analogy about the golf ball is relavent if you count when its being compressed...the rebound portion of the analogy which is only when the ball impacts the ground, compress's ...releases and returns the other direction.
The spring is being compressed from the beginning of the slide movement and doesnt complete the cycle until the slide is in battery.
I can see how the faster slide/weaker spring can "rebound" the slide back faster with assistance from either a shock buffer or just bouncing off of the frame..but physical law dictates anything else to be false. A stronger spring will stop the slide faster (on its own tension) and with more tension/weight, thus return the slide faster than with a weaker spring....using its own power as its driving force. A weaker spring without any help from the frame or buffer assisting in its rebound simply cant do the same thing.
I agree that a stronger spring will close the slide faster than when released from slide-lock or manually slingshotting the slide. It's simple physics when the system starts at rest.
In recoil, however, unless the gun is severely over-sprung, the recoil spring is not going stop the slide's rearward motion completely. The slide will "bottom out" and hit the frame or slide-stop pin, or whatever mechanically prevents the slide from going any further back. In the more lightly-sprung pistol, the slide will hit this "stop" at higher velocity. This is where the "golf ball" analogy comes in- if it hits the stop faster, it'll rebound starting at a higher initial (forward) velocity that it would have with the heavier spring.
This argument about split times is really academic for most of us, since only the top 1% or something of shooters will be able to notice a difference. 40 microseconds?
Sure! That'll halve my split times! 
NOT!
I agree that recoil perception is different between people and guns. I use a stronger spring in my Glock 23/32 and I like it. But in my 75B-SA, shooting +P ammo, I feel less recoil impule with the factory spring than with a Wolff extra-power (16lb). With the heavier spring, the pistol's muzzle ends up rising more and I feel more of a push.
I still think you must be careful when increasing recoil spring weight
in a self-defense weapon, while carrying it. It's well known that overspringing a pistol can cause several types of malfunctions, and increasing spring weight, even while it's not oversprung, will move you closer to certain failure modes. For example, if you hit a round that is on the slow end of the deviation, a heavier spring will mean it has a higher chance to FTE/FTF/FTLTSB. On the other hand, a light spring moves you toward frame/pin battering.
Personally, I don't worry about the wear & tear on the pistol due to shooting carry rounds, either to verify their functionality or to shoot out last-years "carry" rotation. Proload is too expensive to practice with it.
On the other hand, if I'm going to load up a bunch of "warm" to "hot" handloads (all hail old Vihtavuroi data!) and practice with it, or if I'm heading to a steel shoot notorious for steel that won't fall, I'll put the heavier recoil spring in to "conserve" wear and tear on the frame and components.
regards
Zak
AND, this is the THIRD slidestop that has broken in this pistol since JULY of '02 -- that's just six months. 
