I suppose I am explaining that because of the conditions here I will be in fully powered up mode a lot of the time and therefore eering to the tree trunk I think in the UK I would be looking at more of a balance between power up and depower.
Maybe but... you are going to be sailing a boat that is far more heel sensitive than anything you have been in before: flat is nearly everything. And I get the impression that winds in hotter parts of the world are likely to be particularly gusty due to heated air rising. There's also the business of learning to sail it. So spring in the rig gives you much more chance to keep the boat on its feet and driving...
The first time I learned about this was when I rerigged Halo from a tin mast to a plastic one. The original rig on Halo, was pretty much the telegraph pole to end all telegraph poles.... I was very much working on the theory that maxpower was needed for fat forward hand, so it had a solid section (too stiff - Superspars announced the M7 about 6 weeks after I'd ordered an M3) and high hounds to enable a high hoist for the kite.
The kite hoist is just above the top batten, and the jib about the second batten...
When I got a C-tech carbon rig the jib hoist stayed in the same place, but the mast was around 410mm longer so around 20% more topmast...
The difference in how much more manageable the boat was was phenomenal...
I've been learning a lot more about this playing with the rig on my Canoe... Whilst I like to think I wasn't a bad Cherub forward hand I'll cheerfully admit I'm a pretty crap helm, so I do need all the help from the boat I can get, and I sail pretty much exclusively inland, and base, at 400 acres, is not a huge pond. My boat has got an ex Shiny Beast 5515 Superspar, which is 25% thinner wall thickness than the usual thickness for ICs, so is basically flexible. Add to that I am now somewhat fatter than I was in Cherub days, so am towards the top of the Canoe weight range.
The boat has no kite, so I have a single spreader rig and thus rather less scope for using rig setup to tune power. I set the boat up originally with loads of gust reponse for learning - such that it was actually quite difficult to get sufficiently powered up to require hiking off the end of the plank. So loads of aft rake on the spreaders - as the gust hits the increased load on the shroud tends to push the mast forwards, take depth out of the middle of the sail and dump the leech.
After about a year I felt I could deal with less gust response, so ran the spreaders neutral. Grief! What a cow the boat turned into! Instead of accelerating in the gusts she just staggered, heeled and stopped... I must own up to being completely gobsmacked by the change in boat handling... Needless to say this was very slow as well as not much fun, even if I could get the weight out further and had more power, and spreaders settings reverted quite a lump of the way back and the boat was fun tosail again. Since then I've been playing with options - adding more cabon to various bits of the stick - to get more power in without compromising the handling too much, I could go on, but you get the picture...
Now because you need to be running a two spreader rig with caps to support the kite you have a great deal more control of the rig than with a simple rig like the Canoe, and its pretty easy to dial power in and out, chiefly with the caps and checks (D2s). Its probably also easier and safer to add stiffness to a mast by gluing more carbon on than it is to take it away.
If it turns out too floppy you just bang a ton more caps and checks on and get some more luff round put in when it comes to get the sail recut to sit the mast better (I don't believe its likely that you'll get the luff round right first time with a home built mast so always figure that's coming). You can always bang more carbon on later. If its too stiff, on the other hand, the whle business of working the boat up and learning to sail her will be horrible and the boat will be slow. I am quite convinced these days that far more races are lost with too stiff a rig than too flexible a rig, especially in unsteady winds, which according to everything I've read you are going to experience...