This is fascinating to me, as someone naive to the hobby. Can you describe what you're looking for and what adjustments you'd make? Are there two halves of the nib that need to be at the right spacing and alignment for proper ink-wicking or something like that? Does that affect the smoothness of the interaction with the paper too?
I routinely work under a high-magnification dissecting scope to build experimental equipment for neuroscience, but I never considered that people would be doing this to optimized their writing instruments.
Pretty much all of what you wrote is a consideration, but everyone probably has their own preferences (and in some part it's affected by writing angle and penmanship habits). Certain nib styles are better suited to different ways of holding a pen. And there's a lot more to it, since different papers react in different ways to different nibs, and inks are another wide-ranging variable.
I think many people get drawn into the hobby for the endless pursuit of matching pens, papers, and inks, or trying to optimize for various characteristics across different combinations of the above. Of course a lot of people don't bother and just find one that works well enough and leave it at that.
I routinely work under a high-magnification dissecting scope to build experimental equipment for neuroscience, but I never considered that people would be doing this to optimized their writing instruments.