Good test as far as it went.
I, too, suspect the hard latewood would add stiffness on a flat cut piece if it ended up at the upper or lower surface of the brace; it's like those CF-balsa 'I' beams that Smallman makes on his tops. If the softer earlywood ended up at the surface the result would be the other way. I suspect, then, that you'd see more variation in flat cut than quartered brace stock, but similar averages, but that's just a hunch. There's no substitute for sample size.
Classical guitar makers used to split the wood for the fan braces off the outside edge of the top blank. If the blank started out at, say, 5-6 mm thick, and you split them off before you thicknessed it, you'd have plenty for those low braces.
Lutes use a lot of tall, narrow braces, none of them so wide that you could not get them by splitting them from the edges of top blanks. I note that lute braces tend to be about five times as tall as they are wide; I suspect that's related to the strength of the glue line; much more than that and they tend to peel up.
Often,when thinking about the way they used to do things, I find it makes sense to keep in mind that good wood was expensive and hard to get, but labor was relatively cheap. They'd put in extra time to save wood.
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