You COULD dry it down to say 2% moisture content and get great results, but it would be incredibly harsh and dry. No flavor, and you'll hack up a lung.
you have pretty good insight into the lab side of things. In Oregon there are some similarities in the testing marketplace from what I can gather from my personal experience.
Lab takes a sample into chain of custody into their lab and runs a few tests, they report back to the licensed farm their results, important to note that labs take a few tests and report back either the lower end of the results, the middle, or the high end of the results. If the sample provided tests at a low of 14% but the high side of the tests came in at say 23% depending on the lab they will deem it on the high mid or low end.
So that’s the lab side of things depending on how they do their results, let’s look at some practices licensed producers do to amp up their numbers sometimes.
some farms dry some of the samples for testing way to dry for sake of having a higher thc content and some even dust em with Kief as well for the samples for lab samplers.
im not saying this is right and ethical I am simply pointing out some nuances in the industry that are driven by the end consumers IE people who only look at thcas a buying motive.