a pit of quicksand, tapers are. best to stick with published tapers for the first few dozen rods, after that you will have enough to start designing tapers. after 20+ yrs of taper design i still get surprised from time to time. computer modifications are vaguely helpful but they take hundreds of thousands of pieces of info about the interplay in a good cane rod and try to reduce it to a few thousand computations, so, a weak but valuable interpretation is what you end up with.
splinter