Kayak Jack said, " A blunt [stern], like say a transom for an outboard motor, will leave a heck of a stream of turbulence (read drag) behind it. As it gets narrower and sharper, that turbulence and accompanying drag are diminished. It becomes more hydrodynamically clean and streamlined."
That's sort of true, but we were talking about whether to make the stern long and slippery, or to invest in more length and slipperiness in the bow.
On the blunt stern, have you heard of the Kamm effect? At one time, a really slippery car had a long, tapered stern. Kamm discovered that the tapered stern could be chopped off, and that the drag wasn't much worse than that for the lengthy (and impractical) original. The Kamm effect is part of the design for the back end of most of our modern sedans. The turbulence fills, and in a way replaces, the space that could have been occupied by a long taper.
As to whether experts have or haven't agreed on the swedeform configuration, if there were an alternative, don't you think that at least three decades of marathon canoe designers, and marathon kayak designers, would have discovered it? The superiority of swedeform for the fastest human powered paddlecraft is widely accepted. Have you seen Navy warships that weren't swedeform? All I was doing was trying to help you understand it. I guess I failed, but that's OK. Racing improves the breed.
If one wants to design a fast displacement hull, one will find that shortening the stern taper and lengthening the bow taper will pay off. Why is that?
