Well, you wrote "heliar." That's how the Pentac came in. The Aviar is in the dialyte family. Not at all like a tessar or a heliar. Another cult lens, though, whose virtues I've never seen. But then, I'm an ignorant barbarian.
About dogs, I don't have one in any fight. I do, though, have a fair number of Tessars (some made by Zeiss, others by B&L, even one Krauss) and tessar types, use some of 'em. At the moment one of my 85/6.3 B&L's is at Grimes having its little Compound overhauled.
About Eric, he says nothing on his site about whether a lens or good or bad. He just does ray-tracing calculations based on the prescriptions as published in patents or, in the case of some Boyer lenses, from the company's archives. The curves speak for themselves. The closest he comes to expressing an opinion is in his assessments of coverage, which are consistently smaller than manufacturers' claims.
About using good, bad, or indifferent lenses. Wide angle lenses possibly excepted, for most purposes a so-so lens is better than good enough. This is, though, no reason to choose lenses likely to be worse than so-so. To get back to Pentacs, someone, probably J. G. Motamedi, has reported finding most of a moderate-sized sample of wartime 8"/2.9 Pentacs unusable. And Eric's calculated curves for EKCo's heliar types are consistent with how the two I've had shot; not that sharp and not as much coverage as expected.
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