Thanks everyone for the help so far.
John Farley, Frank Sinatra sang pretty well the last time I saw him on the TV - can I not tempt to you to say more? And of course the Brits are right!
Lomcevak - I've only ever tweaked the nozzles in the hover on a couple of occasions alongside Illustrious, the rest of the time I always accepted the slightly low nose attitude. There might be something in that. I'm afraid I don't know any of the chaps at Pax or St Louis - I'd love to hear what they have to say on the matter as presumably they were involved in writing the rules at some point.
Went bouncing round the circuit the other day with this all very much in mind and noticed another slightly odd phenomenon - don't know if it's related. Flying off Illustrious, with lots of wind I definitely remember having to lower the nose a good couple of degrees to prevent aft movement as you take the power off to descend onto the deck. The other day, with only a couple of knots of relative wind over the great USS Bonhomme Richard I was drifting forward in the descent. Now I'd be fully prepared to accept this could be plain old ham-fisted throttle-pumping. Or could that be related to all the other aerodynamic/ingestion etc things that are going on?