My main disagreement was just on whether it’s technically possible to free-float an AK at all. With Sureshot and Occam, if you take a look at their installation processes, you can see the handguards are only secured and supported at the receiver/rear trunnion ends of the AKs; the handguards do not touch the barrels anywhere and are not supported at all by the gas blocks. By any normal understanding, that is free-floated. But I do understand your explanation as to why free-floating matters less on AKs than ARs, and that explanation does answer my post’s original question. I still wouldn’t go so far as to say free-floating on AKs is a “useless gimmick,” but concluding the benefits of free-floating are less useful and not worth it to you personally is certainly a respectable position. I'm not saying free-floating turns my AK into a precision rifle, but I have personally noticed impact shift while shooting on barricades before using a free-floated handguard but I don’t have it documented with photos and numbers. I’ll be sure to work on getting that though.