I see two ways of looking at it. For biological study, you'd want to classify only jake and gobbler, then qualify within those groups as you look for trends to figure out what goes on within a population. My area is air pollution. There are things I know about that would require years of study to characterize and which nobody is really interested even though there are issues which should be addressed. That, I think, is the technical side.

I'm a hunter who can't see detail past thirty yards and that's only directly in front of the lens. What makes a trophy to me is behavior. All the beard and spur length stuff is inconsequential because I don't see it before I kill it. Say a jake that was born early slips in when you're expecting the older you've been working and moving around on for hours. You shoot it for your last bird of the year thinking you had the old boy when that white head popped over the rise. I know I'd be disgusted. That's why I let them walk.

This wasn't an issue in my area until about six or seven years ago. Since then I've called up three male groups that had redhead jakes, short fan gobblers and a single fully fledged gobbler mixed together in them. That's not counting doublets or triplets.