This has been a fascinating thread! I've enjoyed reading all the observations by different players. I've decided that my time is best spent further developing my playing skills before dealing with the issue of which strings to try (synthetics came on the instrument and I'll just stay with them for now). I have, however, settled on unison tuning for courses 1 through 6 (of 8). This may - or may not - have some bearing on which strings I ultimately begin to experiment with.
Thanks for such an interesting discussion. Ned -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html