Bill, have you tried supernatural? We also found maxifort and estamino to be too vegetative and produce huge plants with too few fruit. Supernatural seems better.
I use the "old style" top-grafting technique and this year things have gone well. The first batch of ~30 grafties turned into ~20 plants that are just going into the ground now (Santa Barbara mountains). That's as much as we have space for and need for. Well, we also planted 8 Celebrities, which have decent resistance to the root knot nematodes that plague most heirlooms here. They're not as tasty for eating fresh but produce lots of great tomato puree (gets frozen and used for cooking).
In terms of grafting size I also find that almost anything can be made to work. I obviously try to match, but sometimes one has to be creative cutting high or cutting low. When I have too spindly a scion I also vary the cut angle. For example, cut the rootstock at 45 degrees and cut the scion at ~70 degrees such that the cut surface area on the scion is about the same size as the cut area on the rootstock, then push it all nicely together in the clip. Works best at high cut angles (very slanted cuts).
With supernatural we end up seeding rootstock and scions at the same time, seems to work out OK. Given the price difference between rootstock and scion seeds we sometimes start some scions a few days early, then more at the same time, then more a few days later. But even if all are seeded at the same time as long as I have 2x the number of scions as rootstock it seems I can make some form of match.
I haven't tried the DE stuff and grow everything in soil blocks. Had a disaster there for the past couple of years trying out coco choir. We'd get seedlings that germinate and grow a bit and then just stall out and look generally unhappy, despite adding liquid fertilizer. Our conclusion is that most likely we were having salinity issues. So this year it has been back to peat moss + pumice + compost. What a difference, the plants just leap out of the blocks!
This year's failure (is there a year where something doesn't fail?) has been to use our own worm compost. We put one seed into each block and 4-5 little plants came up! Obviously seed that was in the compost... The good news is that it's our compost so we know we like the varieties, but still, that's not what we're working for! The second batch used quality store bought potting soil instead of compost and while we didn't have the problem with extra seeds germinating the plants didn't do quite as well. We then bought some compost but we ended up with enough plants already.
One minor issue we struggled with for a while is labeling. Because of using soil blocks it's not very practical to stick a label into the soil. We now get needles with colorful heads and color-code each block by pushing one or multiple needles into the soil block. That seems to work and the needles are reusable after some washing and drying, although they do end up rusting eventually.
I think next year I'm going to try what Delerium showed, which is grafting onto leaves in order to try and make the whole healing thing easier. I have to go back and re-read some of those threads. The whole healing chamber thing is the most nerve wrecking and difficult part in the whole grafting process.
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