Quote - "with anti-aliasing set to "Systematic," to eliminate any adaptive anti-aliasing criteria differences between the 2 programs."

Why would you want to eliminate this difference? If Vue7 does a better job with the "optimized" algorithm than Vue6, that's an advantage, so why are you eliminating this difference? I'm not saying Vue7 does a better job with that algorithm, but I just don't see the point of eliminating Vue7 advantages if you are comparing Vue6 with Vue7.
As you know, the systematic algorithm is much slower than the optimized.

Anyway, your conclusions are based on a Mac and most bugs in Vue7 are reported in Mac's. So, maybe you are suffering from some of these bugs? When Vue7 was launched there were a number of people who made tests (Chipp Walters, for example), documented them in this forum, and Vue7 was a much faster renderer than Vue6 on all standard scenes.