Here's another quantifiable fact that places SB above SDC: Range. My bullets deal more damage at range with SB than SDC. The damage dropoff range with SB is shorter than with SDC or especially AB. This means I am more consistent at range.

To counter this you were presupposing that SB adds inaccuracy or increases "phantom bullet" occurrences, but you didn't prove it. This is why I kept using the word "broken". Sure, you may not have actually used the particular word "broken" but you absolutely were implying it by talking about "phantom bullets" and how using SB increases these broken shots (we can argue about the word "broken" but hopefully I've made my point about what I meant).

In the end, as with any competitive game, we turn our heads to the "pros" (or closest thing to them we have, in this case the top sweaty community players that win all the tournies) to learn about the optimal strats, guns, playstyles, perks, builds, etc. When there is variation then it's hard to say what's optimal. But when there's consensus among these elite players then it becomes exceedingly difficult for a random player at a lower level to convince anyone that the elite set of players are playing suboptimally. In this case, it turns out every single sweaty player using TLW uses SB and not AB or SDC. Coincidence? Hardly. These players play against the best competition and they play MORE than any of us, yourself included. They play with every possible option in order to try to find an advantage over their competition. When people discover good, strong, or even brokenly-good/OP things, these things quickly become "meta" within the elite set of players if it actually turns out the discovered thing is legitimately strong.

So in this case, with SB vs. SDC, if there was any real tossup between the two you'd see more pros using SDC. In fact you don't -- everyone uses SB at the highest level of play.