I gotta ask... Why did this picture cause a defoliation test?
I will not discuss what I think is a critical discovery in that picture. I got lucky that all the pistils are facing in one direction and that tiny growing bud site exposes its internal structure. That was a challenge to Flowki to figure it out since he implied that he has all the comprehension of how a plant works and what is acceptable and what is not acceptable.
But, I will share this and you already know part of the answer....
root to vegetative ratio. What I see in that picture can be controlled and manipulated and root/vegetative ratio is one of the approach to manipulate it. The ratio is based on biomass (not height or width), so any negative change in biomass in either side will trigger the plant to react to reach what is the last known optimal ratio.
This logically explain why lollipop, scrog, pruning, topping or any procedures that reduces the vegetative biomass works, restricted only by the rule of third.
What's this got to do with my theory of defoliation? This becomes subjective of course hence the experiment. Optimal ratio slows down as the plant continues its growth, it will balance growth between root and vegetative (including bud sites). At one point or another, this ratio will grind to a halt...plant has reached its maximum growth potential in a given environment. In the case of cannabis, most of the top biomass is in the flower structure (hence that picture). The flowering structure of a plant is a separate identity to that of vegetative identity, it's governed by a set of different bio-chemical signalling. Since my plant has reached maturity, the optimal biomass ratio has slowed down or even insignificant. By defoliation, I'm just reducing the bio-mass of the leaves which I believe at this point is insignificant to the optimal ratio, by doing so, I'm triggering the flowering structure not the vegetative structure to increase the optimal ratio (yes that includes the so called sugar leaves). That's my premise anyway.