I'll follow along with this in case anyone has one that is actually built up and has put it through it's paces. I recently grabbed the IG 5wt blank and it's in line to get built. My initial impression of it though, is that it's more stout than my 8' Steffen 5/6 but slightly less so than my Echo BAG 7wt. Sooooo, we'll see. The nice thing about the IG blanks (speaking of the heavier weights now) is that they fight fish above their weight class. To put it in perspective, my 10wt IG had zero problem getting Albacore in super quick. Part of it is that I don't mess around and the other part is that I never felt as though it was super stressed. The 8wt also fights fish above it's weight class.