Mr.Gumby wrote: ...any player of wind instruments plays by ear and uses ear/had/breath coordination vs as an ongoing process that constantly corrects and adjusts...
For sure, as a friend who is a professional Tuba player told me "the perfect wind instrument cannot be made".
It's quite amazing to me how the professional musicians with perfect pitch always play right in tune no matter what the instrument they're playing is like. I've been at gigs where there's a professional "reed man" with an absolutely horrid old Generation whistle with a bad scale and bad octaves, a thing I wouldn't consider taking to a gig, and he will play it in perfect tune. Having perfect pitch he has the exact pitch in mind and achieves it. It's done without conscious thought or effort.
A University music professor told us about his attempts to make a flute. He said he got frustrated and gave up, because no matter where he drilled the holes he got the same notes.
I'm the opposite, coming from Highland piping where the entire goal is to blow dead steady and adjust the instrument to be in tune when thus blown. So when I play the scale of a whistle or flute any tuning issue is clear.
It's interesting how all those years of fluteplaying and the continuous unconscious adjustments has bled into my Highland piping. As the chanter warms up it gets sharper compared to the drones, and I don't realise that I've been backing off the blowing to keep the chanter on pitch until the chanter cuts out. I think most good Highland pipers would keep blowing steady so you would hear the pitch of the chanter steadily rising but never cutting out.
On uilleann pipes I've got used to shading Low E, which is usually a hair sharp on my chanter, and giving a slight pressure boost to High E, which is usually a hair flat on my chanter. Other than that my chanter is right in tune if blown in a steady consistent way.