VRS...SWP...who cares? It's all theoretical anyway. I mean, we never get into those conditions up high. Nope, either/or happens down low, at the bottom of an approach when there may be no time or altitude to recover. Bottom falls out when you're up at a nice, high 5,000' OGE hover? Here's the procedure:
1) Lower collective,
2) Get some airspeed,
3) Land,
4) Change shorts.
Bottom fall out when you're on short-short final to a confined area?
1) Instinctively pull collective all the way up,
2) Say to self (if there is time), "Thiiiiiis is gonna leave a mark,"
3) Wake up in hospital.
Oh, and another thing. Nick sez that it's a physical impossibility to get VRS at a 300 fpm RoD. Oh yeah? It would be nice if we flew inside of computer hard drives...or if we flew in wind tunnels. But we don't, do we? We fly in the outdoors (well, most of us do, except for that Hanna Reich chick, but that was a long time ago). And, owing to the rather chaotic nature of, well, nature, things don't happen with laboratory regularity and precision. The wind outdoors does not always blow consistently horizontally. There are drafts, both up and down. Now, stick with me for a sec', just supposing we're in a OGE hover, coming down at 300 fpm and we get an updraft of 500 fpm? This updraft lasts for, oh, a couple of seconds, tops. The rotor is now "seeing" a RoD of 800 fpm, no? Enough to incite VRS? Impossible? I think NOT!
I have read Prouty (and Proust, but Prouty was harder to understand). I have seen the actual derived-from-test-flights performance chart plots for a certain helicopter (hint in SN). And I know that the behavior (behaviour, if you prefer) of a rotor is erratic and unpredictable in the absolute. Graph plotpoints all over the place, in other words. Within a given range, of course, and the resulting curves are "close enough for government work" but there's always a "flier" or two or three...anomalies which don't get included because we like our graphs to have nice, smooth curves, not jagged, Alpine-like outlines that look like something off a heart-monitor oscilloscope. And, we humans like to "round-off" stuff whereas nature does not always see things that way.
Still, the difference between SWP and VRS is moot, and makes no difference whatsoever to the rotary-wing pilot. If you get into either at exactly the wrong time, it probably won't matter which recovery technique you try to use. And you won't have time to ask yourself, "Heyyyyyy, is this SWP or VRS?"