A puzzlement.

All my long tea-drinking life, I had read and heard that tea leaves perform
best when unencumbered by tea balls or small insert-infusers. (I guess that's
also why infusers themselves seem to have gotten larger over the years.)

Then I discovered gongfu, which blatantly goes against this theory, and doesn't
give the leaves much expansion room. And some of those yixing pots are no
bigger than a teaball anyway.

So, as an experiment, I repotted some well-spent gongfu'ed oolong leaves into a
new pot and tried rebrewing them with plenty of expansion room, to see if there
was more flavor locked away that hadn't been unleashed. Nope.

Does this mean there's less reason to follow the aforementioned "rule?" Have
we been lied to by The Man?

Just interested in your comments. And apologies if I've overlooked something
that makes this a dumb question.

Joe