No it's not about willy waving but you still haven't come down from your ivory tower to state your hours/years/appropriate experience.
So, as someone who trains people to deal with deteriorating weather, especially when there is no IF option due to icing and the job still has to get done because you have casualties on board, I have no appropriate experience???
Your attempt to make a science of VR is pitiful and, whilst there are visual traps and illusions (scale, goldfishbowl and hidden ridgelines for example) the fact is you can either see where you are going or not. If you have to descend below your minima to keep visual then you should turn back or land or divert using a bad-weather plan - this is not rocket surgery.
What we are dealing with is poor decision making, not whether there are enough visual cues to control the helicopter - that happens after the poor decisions are made and the sucker keeps on going.
If we are talking about analysing visual cues, I don't suppose you have hovered in recirculating snow at night using a mixture of white light and NVG??? You can blather on about 'Tau' all you like but it comes down to searching desperately for enough visual information to assess your height and speed (or lack of it). This is not where we should train VFR pilots to be - we should train pilots to avoid such situations unless they are properly equipped in terms of aircraft fit and adequate training to manage those conditions.
Out of interest, I took part in a BAE study in a simulator in Bedford 15 or so years ago which was looking at visual cueing Vs handling characteristics and how degrading one meant improving the other in order to maintain adequate control. The sortie profile looked a low level flight, hovering, mask and unmask behind obstacles and transitions to and from the hover and I suspect that much of what we discovered was eventually fed into all sorts of other studies (including the CAA) as it was pioneering work at the time.
The fact is that in an unstabilised aircraft like a robbie, any degradation in visual cues cannot be offset by an improvement in handling qualities and a departure from controlled flight is simply a matter of time. Therefore I come back to the same conclusion - only by avoiding those deteriorating conditions can you fly VFR safely and all the macho 'we pushed on but still got through but it was quite exciting' is what keeps encouraging people to push on when they should turn back.
Flying VFR safely is not a science or an art, it is all about decision making - not formulas about visibility vs cloudbase - if in doubt chicken out - pressonitis kills!
By the way - your Desktop Virtual Environment studies are directed towards electronically representing the outside world (HUDs, DNVGs, Apache monocles etc) and are only relevant in that they emphasise that poor contrast due to low light levels or reducing visibility greatly affects the brain's ability to judge distance and speed - no sh*t sherlock!
BTW2 - the answer to reducing visual cues is SCAN but this is not for low-time pilots in R22s - the answer for them is don't go or turn back/land!