Alright gents, thanks for all the thoughts and feedback so far. I went to the range over lunch today to put some of this to the test. I've been wanting to see what I could do on the @
Mr_White exercises with the J-frame, so that's where I started. I made the following modifications:
Bill Drill - 5 rounds instead of 6
4 body, 2 head - 3 body, 2 head. Wanting to keep the difficulty of the 2 head shots (plus those being the more effective shots for a "stop" scenario).
I did not modify the times. Based on the difficulty of shooting the J-frame, I decided one less round was probably a wash. Maybe we can disagree and there should be some kind of a reduction in the par times.
Starting position: I shot the whole exercise from hand in pocket, on-gun. To me, this is one of the HUGE advantages of pocket-carrying a J-frame is that I can be chilling out in the checkout line or pumping gas with my hands in my pockets and a full firing grip on the gun without alerting anyone that that's what I'm doing.
Not bad overall. Would earn a Dark Pin. That's what I earned in class with Gabe shooting my 17 from SS IWB concealment as described in the OP. Also, I've put many, many thousands of rounds through Glocks in general, and my G17's in particular. Today's range session brings my lifetime total rounds through J-frames to probably 175 with 150 being through this gun.
Next, I put a vertical 3x5 at 25 yards and fired 2 cylinders at it in fairly rapid succession (maybe 1 round per second ROF):
Finally I decided to try the "hands relaxed at sides" draw from the pocket to head shots at 7yds. These times were obviously longer than firing grip start. I started getting faster by the 5th rep, but also started degrading accuracy. Realistically with some practice (and perhaps a holster mod) I believe I can get it to about 2 sec (-1 denotes in the head area, but outside the 4" circle):
Overall I'm not disappointed with this performance. There are certainly more factors to consider beyond how well you can shoot 5 rounds at static paper with a pistol, but I don't think the J-frame is this "unshootable mystery" for me.