General thoughts:
1) You need to be a 'Maven' to paddle one! In all my other squirt boats you need to muscle things around a bit (due to the weight of the boat, I suspect, in addition to what volume is there). The Maven DOES NOT work this way. Micro twitches and paddle angle changes have a HUGE effect in this boat. As I paddled and got more dialed in to it things started to get interesting....
2) The boat in a cut down version feels less stable side to side than the full cut version. I suspect this is due to the combination of the stern being wholly in the water, and the tip of the bow just out (classic low cut chop a la Snyder's squirt book
)...the edges have a lot of effect, all the time, Once you're dialed in a bit it's amazing what you can correct for with a VERY subtle body shift.3) Stern squirts. I had to be MUCH less aggressive with them, due to the lack of volume in the stern. NO PROBLEM getting it up on the stern though. A very slight angle and slight sweep and BOOM you're verticle. The more I relaxed I was in the boat the more controlled they were, and by the end I had some really pretty stern pivots if I do say so myself
.4) Speed. This boat is still WAY faster than the Acrobat or Oxygen. Assuming you can stay flat on it, and not try and ride an edge (which doesn't work...you'll start to edge-squirt
), attaining to surf a wave shouldn't be an issue. IF you're comfortable. In that respect, it reminds me of the Groove....5) Rocker. There are plusses and minuses to it. The BIG plus is a huge zone to paddle in, vs the micro strokes you have to take in the Oxygen (or Groove for that matter...). It also allows a flat stern in the water while the bow peaks out, which makes for a fast boat... That said, i had trouble dialing cartwheels because of the different angles of the hull (and trying to be too aggressive...)
6) Cartwheels...once dialed in they should be super easy. The two issues I had where the different angulation mentioned above due to the amount of rocker, and the lack of momentum (the boat is about 18 lbs fully outfitted). "Production" boats will be slightly heavier...if I had to do it over again I would go with a 5/6 layup instead of a 4/5. The flat surfaces could use a bit more stiffening up....
7) The biggee. Can I bow stall it? My bow stall technique is not the greatest...I can't really stay up in the wheelboy (not used to balancing over that much volume!), it takes some work to get the Acrobat down (master cut), so the only boat I've been able to easily get the bow down is the Oxygen...and, welll, who couldn't?
So, you tell me
For the curious, it is easy to pearl into a bow squirt if you need to, and just as easy to keep that from happening with a slight weight shift back. AdkSara has some rather amusing video of me playing around with this that I may post at some point.
For this stall I actually "cheated", and just leaned forward, put my paddle in the water, and swept back and forth to angle the bow down. VERY easy and controlled.
As of right now it looks like I have two more Maven's to build, and neither are for me
. With luck we may have 3 Maven's at the Armada, possibly all different cuts. I'm not sure I'll be taking it down the NB, but we'll C 
I just hope that I will have recovered enough from the 70 to be able to paddle 
Go back North on Thursday. Play in squirt boats all day Friday 
Day after day I watched those flies try to eat through my gloves to eat me. There's not a mosquito, nor a swarm of mosquitoes that can hold a candle to the meanest of all critters on Earth, the black fly.