OK, MC, just a few quick thoughts.
First, I find espresso to my preferred level of roast to be no problem at all on the Behmor. I use P2, and hit cool once 2c starts to roll. I've not heard many complaints about getting to espresso roast levels with good results, the problems seem to be with harder beans, large roast loads and possibly long profiles.
In my opinion, Brazil is just way too one dimensional to be useful for doing the kind of testing that I want to do in order to find nuances. But I definitely have not seen any problems with soft beans, even using P1 or P2. I personally don't believe in the usefulness or necessity of P3-P5 quite yet.
As far as timing into 1c on P2, you want to cut the heat just before so that you don't enter 1c with too much energy. The only way I can see stalling a load into 1c cutting 30s before is if the load is too large - I won't do more than 8-10oz with this machine. The danger of cutting at 1c is that you can sometimes have too much heat built up in the system, and knock the beans straight into 2c like P1 can.
Still hope to hear from folks that have significant and positive hands-on experience with P3, 4 or 5 here to give me direction that will allow one of those profiles to show its best
