Smudge,
Always ready to advise, my dear chap, and catch up as slowly as you like (for when the Good Lord made time, He made plenty of it).
In a word, the four-degree Angle of Incidence made it a better aeroplane, but a worse dive bomber. I never got a Mk.IV to fly, never mind dive. All I have to go on is this:
Captain Eric (Winkle) Brown RN tested a VV (in UK) and thought that it was inferior to the JU-87 "Stuka" in a vertical dive. We suspect that it was a Mk.IV he got for testing, for I don't think any of the earlier Marks came to Britain. It stands to reason that a zero angle made the earlier Marks far steadier in pitch during the dive, which was why it was designed in in the first place.
The American Army got the earlier Marks I-II (A-31); their pilots couldn't see over the nose, and rejected it (neither could we, but we had to live with it). They demanded an AoI, got it (A-35), then decided that they didn't like it at all anyway. The Mark IVs (A-35s) were then palmed off to us (we took them to the UK and used them as target tugs), the Free French in N.Africa and (I think) to the Brazilians.
It is almost impossible to distinguish the four-degree wing from the zero in photographs, but fortunately all the A-35s (Mk.IVs) have a 0.50 Browning in the back in place of the 2x .300/303 in Mks.I-III (A-31). This sticks out like a sore thumb !
Warmtoast,
It was potentially dangerous, but the technique used (to walk past across the nose, take the tip of the lower blade in the nearer hand and pull it after as you continued to walk away, made it fairly safe.
In days of old, when they had big old props , they had a Ford driven device called "Hucks Starter" which did it mechanically. Could have designed a smaller model for the TM, I suppose, but they never did.
Danny.