Ancient Mist, read the topic in my projects section on the VIC, i did some experimenting on the 8XA, and will continue to do more, when I get some free time from university.
Your conclusions are on track, in the NZ video he says "if i want to increase hydrogen gas yield all I have to do is increase the size of this coil... someone asks a question ... he says ... I'll just design a new one and wrap more coils to it" ... key word here being "coils", he designs a new bobbin, and adds more coil sections to it, so that capacitance increases with the inductance, and like you said he draws the capacitance in parallel, which is what you get when you have a self resonant coil, when you drive a coil near it's self resonant frequency it's impedance goes to infinity, and the capacitance acts in parallel, and since the choke are there to restrict amps, more inductance means more impedance, and since the chokes are on the same core as the primary, it means they also effect the turns ratio for the step up voltage, so they do BOTH, they increase the voltage, and they increase the amp restriction
about the amp surge in the capacitor, think about what this means, the voltage only means a difference of charge, and for the voltage to be maintained means that the charge difference has to be maintained, so if you get an amp surge, this is like saying that the charge has been quickly neutralized, and it's not all of a sudden sucking a massive amount of electrons out of the coil, so it's taking charge out of the water through ions, and if you get enough ions carrying electrons to the plates then you won't be able to maintain a voltage, so what does this mean from a design perspective? well when you raise the voltage level high enough Stan starts talking about entering the liquid to gas ionization state, and it's about this time that he also introduces the electron extraction circuit, so that when he starts ionizing the water, he is able to, and has to, remove the electrons, or they would neutralize the charge on the plates, so i imagine, when someone gets to this experimental stage, they would notice the effect, and then realize maybe they have extra electrons in the water bath they should try to pull out, and if they are there, they should come out of the water, which solves the problem, as well provides free electricity, and sets you up with destabilized gas atoms which when burned will burn hotter, and release more energy
also, the fact that water is a dielectric is important here, worth reading about too