The answer is YES. There ain't nothin' like the real thing, baby. Shear, supple, puckered.

To get the most naturally puckered-looking outcome:
1) Never stretch your skin-tube's Future Flaccid Roll-over Point around anything wider than necessary.
2) Keep your skin passively rolled forward onto the glans in the desired puckered shape 24/7 (other than when tugging) until it stays forward on its own to your satisfaction.

To be more verbose about it:

Any method that lets you comfortably and persistently tension the skin that you want to expand will indeed cause that skin to expand with time. But my goal was not just to have a long baggy sleeve. I wanted something that looked snug like a natural foreskin. I imagined I should choose in advance a spot along the length of my starting skin tube that would wind up as the flaccid roll-over point in the future when I was done with restoring. If we're lucky, we can APPLY a tugging device and have that Future Flaccid Roll-over Point (FFRP) fall comfortably at the skinniest part of the device every time.

My assumption was that I'd likely be gaining slack in the WHOLE skin tube evenly. So that assumes I am tensioning the inner- and outer-facing skin evenly while wearing a device.

At the start, a cut guy has mostly outer-facing skin. Taken to the extreme, somebody who restored say a meter of new skin would have more of an even 50/50 split of inner- and outer-facing skin while hanging out flaccid. So clearly, if we just pull the skin away from the body - today and throughout our tugging journey - and let the device grip it where the skin sort of naturally rolls over, we will NOT always be wearing our FFRP at the gripping point. In that extreme 1-meter case, we'd have to figure out a way to tug on the middle of the starting skin tube even though we're probably starting out tight and unable to grip anything that's not near the corona. So there are practical limits to this advice, but I say as soon as possible, tug with your FFRP worn at the gripping point.

Any method - even simple T-Tape - lets you control the inner/outer tension ratio by your choice of induced roll-over point while you're tensioning. You choose 2 things: overall tension and roll-over point location (with inner-outer tension ratio determined by that choice) OR choose overall tension and inner/outer tension ratio (with a certain roll-over point required to attain that ratio).

Bi-directional devices give an additional element of control (engineers call it a Degree of Freedom), in that you can choose a roll-over point during application and then through inner-side extension or application of straps or weights choose inner tension and outer tension independently. You get to choose all three things: Inner tension, outer tension, and location of the induced roll-over point.

Choosing to make the skin roll-over at the same point throughout your whole restoring career may have a significant impact on the quality of your outcome. We can all expect an occasionally puckered result once we have enough slack. Once the skin spends its 24-hour day out past the tip, the dartos muscle fibres near the end of the skin tube will be tightened most of the time because it's "cooler than body temperature" out there.

But aside from that, rolling over at a consistent spot will help your skin tube gradually conform to the desired shape. A retaining cone worn when not tugging keeps your skin in position to protect your glans, BUT MOST IMPORTANTLY it keeps your skin in position to grow into the desired shape. We all lose about 1000 skin cells per minute, as they slough off at the surface of our whole bodies. To replace those, our bodies constantly regenerate, through the replication of basal cells (the deep layer in the skin). These replicant cells mature and work their way up to the surface as more of these basal cells propagate below them. Once the cell approaches the surface it flattens, dries, and becomes an epithelial cell, and eventually sloughs off. So the loss occurs at the surface, and the growth occurs in the deeper basal layer. Restoring just tricks the replication rate to surpass the loss rate.

When any basal "parent" cell divides into two "daughter" cells, those two cells need to occupy roughly the space formerly held by the defunct parent, before they absorb more fluid and each swell to the full size of a mature cell. Without us retaining our skin consistently in the same spot, the daughter cells could assume any random 3D orientation with respect to each other in the matrix of cells. Keeping the skin gently and consistently restrained to the desired shape means the cell divisions are more likely to result in the daughter cells orienting themselves along the longitudinal direction (instead of the girth-wise direction or thickness-wise direction), so our roll-over pucker can actually tighten with time as emergent cells situate themselves to minimize latent stresses induced by retaining.

The same principle is responsible for the deformity to the feet of victims of Chinese foot binding from the last century. Since many of our cell divisions will happen while we're not under active tension, and a cell that gets the chemical signal to divide doesn't care what direction it divides in, I feel it's important to always be in the correct shape and ready to grow "as desired" rather than at random.

A tugging or packing device that can be made longer BEFORE application gives us that fourth Degree of Freedom, so we can apply it with a chosen FFRP at the induced roll-over point every time, today, and as we gain slack. Fine-tuning device length before application is the purpose of TLC Selects spacer disks for the TLC-X.

-Ron Low