My experience leads me to disagree. Among Alan Adler's scores (hundreds?) of posts in the Aeropress thread at Coffeegeek, where a huge number of issues with its design were hashed out as perhaps with no other manual device on the planet, not once did he indicate that "slow is part of the design."
(And I'm STILL getting the links wrong-- ARGH -- the posts just BELOW the posts I linked to, people. Good grief. I can yammer coffee at CG till the cows come home, but I can't get the links right. Seriously, read that background material. It'll help.)
To the contrary, "slow is part of the design" has been largely repudiated as a principle in the growing popularity of the "bottomless" dripper cones that recognize that rate of flow is properly under control of the person doing the brewing. It is not properly a constraint on that person's prerogative to vary the brewing variables at will. The engineer's proper goal is to
get out of the way of the brew -- by which I mean
constrain no variables.
Now in truth it's different in the consumer world. Joe Consumer needs to be told how to do stuff, often enough. But I think we're talking in geek territory, where literacy with and fluency in the brewing variables is our bread and butter. We don't want our degrees of freedom, our axes of operation, limited by some designer who has "how do I do this?" Folgers or Flavored folk in mind.
But Alan Adler was no such designer. This was one of the few failures in the design of the Aeropress. As with most design failures, it didn't result from the failure of a zealous quest to find the perfect cap hole design. It resulted from deeming that a relatively unimportant issue, with no quest at all. Bear in mind that Alan was not, and is still not, a coffee geek per se. He's merely a design geek -- and a good one. But on this he dropped the ball. And why not? For precedent he had generations of coffee device designers who labored under the delusion not that flow rate was unimportant in devices like dripper cones, but that it was valuable to limit the flow rate to "help" consumers get things right.
It makes sense. If Joe Blow uses a grind that's too coarse, it helps to slow the flow so that wet time is increased. It self-corrects. As the grind gets finer, the holes in the dripper become less the choke point than the grind itself.
But that's for a less literate age. It's seriously time for designers to turn the corner and not coddle Jane Consumer. If she's willing to buy a manual dripper in these far more coffee-literate times, by golly, take that as a sign that she's probably willing to learn the basics about brewing variables. Why not? She's taking her coffee seriously, finally, the same way she takes her Slow Food or Local Food seriously.
(this is turning into a manifesto asserting a particular value on the cultural issues bearing on the question of coffee device flow rate, a true sign that GCBC is every bit as geek as CG)
None of that's relevant to the Aero anyway, it's just pointing out that ways of thinking about flow have been . . . unfortunate in the design world in general. Alan had few examples -- if any! -- of devices that took this concern seriously.
Well, to conclude instead of meander further -- no, we DO need the filter to be wide open. That allows the person doing the brewing to architect his own extraction with no needless limit on the range of the flow variable. Being satisfied with a limited flow rate because it may happen to match your own balance of the variables -- that is, thinking the design is fine because you, personally, don't need it to be different, is not good thinking -- or at least, not generous thinking. It indicates kind of a "why would anyone concern themselves to do things differently than I do?" attitude. I'm not accusing you of actively not caring; I'd just suggest that personal contentment with a thing doesn't instantly motivate one to advocate for changes to that thing to serve purposes valuable to other people (where those changes would not affect your own use). I personally shrug about most sports -- but I wouldn't advocate bad seating designs at the stadium.
This may have been what happened with Alan in the cap design. But designers should never shrug off something like that -- especially with an insane number like 68% obstruction.
Some of this is just illusion in action. "Ah that filter has a lot of holes in it. No biggie." OK, so if I gave you a filter with 2/3 of them removed and also gave you a device that allowed them
all to effectively pass fluid, would you not ask me "why didn't you put more holes in this thing? there's a lot of flat metal between relatively few holes here!" Of course you would -- rightly. This proper judgment does not become moot merely because the holes are rendered ineffective by their use in a particular device. In the case of the original Coava and Able filters, they already have too few holes. That was known the moment they hit the street by anyone familiar with previous generations of similar devices, and the constancy of this critique doubtless led to the version we now anticipate getting our paws on.
Gah! I yammer. Up and out.
Credo:
"Free the Flow!" 
