I agree, you have to look at antennas as the whole system, I don't think anyone here is denying that, especially bob85 who created the thread. But in order to look at the whole system you have to also look at all of its component parts and what they are doing, AND put them in perspective. An antenna is no better than the worst part of the antenna system. In the case of this thread the feedline is definitely not helping the rest of the antenna any, even though we don't really know anything about the given antenna aside from its feedpoint SWR, and we have to figure that out.
Knowing the whole antenna system is important, but what you suggest appears, at least to me, like focusing only on one part of said system, and that is making only the radio happy with a 1:1 SWR at the radio. This is important, but other things affect the radiated signal far more than a reasonably low (2:1) SWR at the radio, for example, antenna efficiency. A 1% change in antenna efficiency will have more of an effect on radiated RF than a 2:1 SWR reading taken at the radio (in comparison to a "perfect" 1:1 SWR reading), and that is assuming the reflections presented by the 2:1 SWR are counted entirely as loss, which we know isn't necessarily true.
Another thing to look at, and ironically part of the subject of this thread is feedline losses, and their effect on the rest of the antenna. If the feedline in question is loosing 70% of the signal the radio transmits into it the radio will be happy over a very large bandwidth, but the antenna itself will only see 30% of the signal.
As I said above, I agree with you on having to look at the entire antenna system (and I think most people who posted in this thread do as well), however, there is far more going on in an antenna system than what the radio thinks it sees. The dummy load example I gave before shows that to be true even if it is only very close to a perfect SWR match.
The DB
