Steve,
Thinking on this thread, there is an experiment you could do that may provide some insight. Using the 3 different styles of bows you talked about, place each on the tiller tree and when taking them to full draw, for each inch of tip travel, mark the distance the draw travels. This gives a relative idea of the string acceleration from full draw to brace. Not sure how this would affect arrow design, but it could provide some insite without the need of a highspeed camera.
Ken
Actually, I thought of something else. Do a force-draw curve where the force increment is constant. Then if you scale the tip travel-draw curve so that it matches the force-draw curve you can compare the 2 different draw curves and see the disparity between the energy vs distance traveled that is being imparted to the arrow. This may tell you something about the "harshness" of the bow.