Bollocks.
I hope you realise, GK, that I am not casting aspersions on your character or commenting on you at all, but simply concisely expressing my opinion of the view you have put forward. Naturally I wish to avoid any handbags at dawn or any appearance of mod-bias, so by all means say whatever you like about my opinions (not me)... but really, this totally frustrates me. Clearly there is a lot more to airsoft than range and there is more to range than FPS but to say that when using a good hop unit 22FPS produces pointlessly minimal difference in range not only flies in the face of my, and many others', experience, but also physics. If we were somehow restricted to having to choose more muzzle energy or better hop then these arguments might hold water, but we're not and they don't. If a good hop will get a 328FPS BB the same distance as a mediocre hop gets a BB at 350FPS, then 350FPS through the 1st will go even further
Where this falls down is not when comparing good hop units but shit ones, where the BB is so unstable in flight that the lift generated by backspin acts less in the vertical plane as it yaws to one side and the other (as the effect is to a large degree self-correcting in terms of absolute deviation from a birds eye view of a line between muzzle and target - off-centre negative pressure will obviously cause that side of the BB to lift more than the other, but it is a spheroid so it just rotates about the trajectory as a 2nd axis: it achieves equilibrium but now has angular momentum so goes too far the opposite way, whereupon uneven lift brings it back, then too far, etc.) - basically the more the force generated by backspin is not acting directly opposite to gravity, the less far the BB will go and, if this is bad enough, more muzzle energy will just make the BB hit the ground with more forward velocity - I believe this is how a dirty barrel reduces range.
The plain fact is that even 1m of extra range is an advantage and if that is the only advantage you have, careful play can convert it into hitting your opponent before they hit you. However higher FPS creates 2 other advantages: 1) the BB takes less time to travel to the target...
target@35m so 35m / 100m/s = 0.35s
you don't have to be Usain Bolt to run very quickly over short distances...
100m in 10s would be damn good going for an average airsofter carrying gear & kit over mixed terrain, but 10m in 1s...? I'm unwell and in most circumstances i could beat that, but whatever, it makes the maths easier 10m/s
0.35s x 10m/s = 3.5m as the distance which your aim point has to lead in front of a running target
35m / 106.68m/s = 0.328s x 10m/s = 3.28m
22cm... pointlessly minimal, right? Wrong. A standard man sized target is 60cm wide and at 35m a practiced shooter firing an averagely decent AEG, like an OOTB Top Tech, snap shooting, is going to have a grouping on that target of about 40-45cm. 22cm puts some of those shots up to 12-14.5cm off a fat bastard in PLCE webbing... but of course that is not what having to lead a running target by 22cm less actually means, it's just a convenient thought experiment to demonstrate what that distance actually translates into in terms of pure static target shooting. In reality what leading a target by less in order to hit them actually means is that the target has not just less time to react but fewer choices for effective changes of direction.
The truth however is that, with a good hop set up, 22FPS (in this muzzle energy band) will give about 6-8m more effective range, which isn't that much, but in many skirmish situations it's the difference between in cover and not, ie i can keep your head down with my 267x6.02mm TBB, Element M105 spring, Double O-ring piston head, gucci grease, O-ringed air nozzle and G&G green rubber, putting out high 340's on 0.2s, whereas with your G&G green rubber and hey have an H-nub at 325-30FPS you'll have to flank me and/or get a team mate with a hotter gun to pin me while you get closer, unless you can herd cats well enough to get enough players with mags in fresh/wound, and ready to rock on command (and get where the target is and what suppressing fire actually entails ) to overcome me with sheer volume of inaccurate lob shots... but of course I can just retreat a couple of meters and you have to start again, and all the while I, 1 shooter with a well set up AEG in decent cover, hold up half of your team, the rest of my team have a numerical advantage wherever they attack.
But going back a paragraph and making point 2) I find what I miss most when some modification results in less FPS, for eg when I swapped the above TBB out for a shorter Systema MP5 BS 6.04mm barrel (it's all in the name lol - no actually it was a hair more accurate) only dropping about 5FPS, is the degree of flatness of trajectory. I find this most important when I'm shooting at people in cover, they may only be visible for a fraction of a second and pop up somewhere other than where I last saw them - anything which makes the BB fly more true to where your sighted viewpoint suggests it ought to will always make snap shooting more effective, but also when you're aiming at someone behind a small opening, if you can only get a BB that far on a parabola that ends with the BB coming down at 25-30° to the horizontal, or more, the width of the barrier has the effect of closing off the window and even if you get the shot through, the more it slows the steeper it falls and you know yourself, people often don't notice light hits low down.