Discus/DG-300 performance difference

Hi All
I'm currently in the market for my first glider and am looking at standard class machines of the Discus/DG-300 era. Having read the Johnson tests and many posts on this forum, I'm a bit confused as to where the touted performance difference comes from though. Dick Johnson found the polars to be near enough to identical and demonstrated so with a figure overlaying them in the DG-300 article. Despite that though, there seems to be a feeling in this forum that the Discus is a superior machine and competition results seem to support that. Given the extremely similar glide performance, is there some other factor which makes the Discus a better performer or are it's superior competition results simply because better/more competitive pilots bought it?



David