Your speculation is wrong from everything I've seen from inside the house, Gary. You might ask yourself how this could be since there's no rubber stop to bump against that I've ever seen; it's done with electronics. There is, however, something interesting to consider about Pat-traps.
Past-President Neal Crausbay asked, a couple of years ago, whether the _distribution_ of hard angles was the same for hand-sets and Pat-Traps, the difference being that the traverse of the former is based on a circle, the latter on a linear actuator.
I tried to test this in a naturalistic setting, the SW Grand for a couple of years, but it's impossible since in real life traps are not set very carefully centering the target (or the wind comes up) and so you get way more of one side than the other even if you track 125 targets.
But the more I consider Neal's point, the surer I am that he's on to something. The linear system ensures that the speed of movement is about the same no matter where the trap happens to be in its traverse. But the circle should lead to motion like a sine wave, which is slow at the "ends" and rapid in the center. I'll have to look at a hand set when I get a chance to confirm this, but I'm betting on it right now. I did a recent test of maximum angles and you have to watch a whole five-shooter sub-event to be sure you actually saw the hardest angle - there aren't very many of them.
But Gary, all this two-hole/three-hole Pat-Trap/handset guff is about as pointless as it can be. There's a lot of play in any handset with time on it since a rebuild; at the Grand in the last years you could move most of them at least an inch - and get a huge "clank" as well - due to accumulated "slop" in bushings and so on. Likewise, the sensors on Pat-traps may or may not be where they should be (and may or may not be of equal sensitivity) and the routine of centering them in the morning (as was _always_ done with a hand-set) is done annually if ever at most clubs now, and the effect is, even if the "spread" is right, some plenty wide angles, if only on one side.
As I've posted many times, the winning scores at the Grand didn't change much in 30 years, at the Minnesota State shoot in 50 years. When we shot straightaway from one and five in 1996, the handicap averages for the top 40 shooters dropped by about half a bird.
Good shooters break the targets and beat less-good shooters most of the time and there's no way around it. And why should it either surprise or bother us?
Neil