The kind of test that you are talking about is under development, in that I will be able to put a measurement number on the transient error from the decimation > reconstruction process. This will be useful to explore the actual errors involved in reconstructing transients from sampling; and I hope it will provide correlation between measurements and observed sound quality.
Although I am confident that this test will show huge errors for conventional filters against WTA - and it will hopefully prove the case for the WTA method, in that the errors will be so large nobody could deny that it would be significant. But what I am actually worried about is the change from say the 164,000 taps of Dave to the 1M in a M scaler - we may find that the actual measured difference using this test is small. Then we are back to using listening tests to actually evaluate whether these small changes have audible consequences.
I will give you another example. When developing Dave I had distortion harmonics at -130dB - which was matching the state of the art for DAC's - but I always wanted it to be better. And I had built lots of prototypes, steadily reducing distortion by small but significant amounts. Now this was an ego thing; I had distortion I could not explain, nor reduce, and wanted to get rid of it; I had no thought it would actually make a difference SQ wise.
Anyway, I made a breakthrough and discovered the source of the residual distortion and fixed it, so harmonics were all below -150dB, and higher order harmonics were some 30 dB better - a huge change in measured performance in one stroke. So then I listened to it and was very surprised - the difference was easily audible, and not what I expected - it sounded much more transparent with better detail resolution. Moreover, subsequently with other projects I have seen similar things - when higher order harmonics are reduced it sounds brighter with better transparency - and that is odd, as one would expect it to sound warmer with the removal of high order harmonics.
But the point I am making here is that -130 dB harmonics are well below the threshold of audibility, and reducing it should not be audible; but it is nonetheless. And this is where we get into difficulties with the sound science posters; not that something exists technically (and proven by measurements), but that these very small errors are actually audible.