PT,
There is a vast mythology about pipe and cigar tobacco that goes way back. In the mid 1800s, authors wrote about tobacco production that they never witnessed first-hand, and propagated a lot of silliness. Alfred Dunhill's 1950s book, "The Gentle Art of Smoking," contained a high titer of BS. You'd think he would have known better, but his fame derived from retailing tobacco, rather than studying the craft of growing and finishing it. Zino Davidoff's book (late 1960s) on The Cigar, is better, but still shows a comprehensive lack of production detail.
In this Internet age, the greatest villain is copy-and-paste. With the 1990s "Cigar Boom," everybody and his brother wrote authoritatively about things they knew little about. And those "Aficionado" authors swallowed the marketing points of cigar vendors unquestioningly.
With the exception of the fine metabolic and genetic detail available in some scholarly journals, the FTT forum is nearly unequaled (worldwide) for experience-based information about tobacco growing, curing and finishing.
Bob