You're right about the over-sharpening. On the sailboat picture, with a white mast on a blue sky, and distant faces, it was very obvious that applying global Edge Sharpen 2 made everything jagged (even though this was the setting that Michael used in his essay).
And yes, I am printing them out to see the actual differences. The way I do it is I start with a 16 bit Tiff direct from the RAW (0 Sharpness) and then apply a Capture, Creative, and Output and save it as a Tiff. Then I do the same, changing either the Capture or Creative, and save that one, till I have five or six files to compare.
Each file is at 300 ppi, which with a 10D prints about 7 inches tall, and so, to make accurate comparisons, I just crop each to the same 1.5 inch wide section, create a New blank page at 8x11 300 ppi, drag each cropped strip onto the page, label each, and print them up on one sheet of Canon Pro Paper.
The thing is, I've always used Fred Miranda's 10D CSPro II action for sharpening, since it's designed for the 10D files and doesn't sharpen skies, and while I was hoping to improve my sharpening with the Photokit Sharpener, I'm just now, with Narrow Capture straight to Output, getting close to matching Miranda's Level 4 Fine Detail sharpening.
My next test will be a night shot (RAW 1600) to test the Smoothing sharpening, and then I'll go back and try to improve the sailboat Narrow Capture.