David,
the yard angles are just a function of the needed mast balance in the sail. With 70° yard and the slingpoint at 55%, the balance can be varied between 12 and 17%. With a 60° yard, the balance can be up to 24-25%. A sail I recently drew up with 20-21% balance was given a yard angle of 65°.
Now I found a two-year-old study I made to see what yard angle was needed to have 25% mast balance. As can be seen on the diagram below, both sails set with a comfortable 10° halyard angle and with the slingpoint 5% aft of the middle.
For my own use, on my last three boats, the required mast balance has been between 10 and 17%, so 70° yard has worked fine. A sail with 60° yard on Johanna would either have forced the sail too far forward, calling for a mizzen, or I would have needed an over-tall mast to keep the halyard angle within reason.
Hong Kong parrels.
I can understand that you had negative experience with these on your low-AR fanned sails on Tystie and Fantail (unless you had very stout battens). Such wide, low-AR sails with little balance are a challenge to make set well. The Johanna-style sails with parallelogram lower panels and vertical luff and leech are much easier to deal with, once the THP and 2/3-up YHP were introduced. After that, the Hong-Hong parrels have lived an easy, but still useful life. They keep these lower panels setting well even when the pull angles from the sheets varies.
Now I looked up Tystie’s first sail, found in JRA-newsletter #38. The yard angle is a whopping 83° and the mast balance is just about zero. No surprise that you had to struggle with that (huge) sail. My Johanna-style sails are moderate, middle-of-the-road designs compared to that.
Conclusion.
There is no reason for blaming the Hong Kong parrels. On my sails, I just install them and then forget about them. I haven’t touched Ingeborg’s HKPs since 2019.
Arne
(PS: If I get the motivation, I may one day make two additional ranges of master sails; one with 65° and one with 60° yard angle to cover a wide range of mast balance needs - but that will have to wait...)