Sorry to pick at a nit here, but, we are talking separate hydraulic systems front & rear... while 1200 RPM's enough to drive my SEE's front bucket into a pile of snow no problem, if it's wet heavy snow the bucket simply won't lift that load until I bump the RPMs. Given FLU idiosyncracies, I don't know if this is a design issue or just my Mog, but I suspect my backhoe could lift the same load at 1200 RPM given the beefier rear hydraulics. Regardless, before moving snow with the front bucket operating from inside the cab this past winter,
I got in the habit of hitting the high-idle switch on the backhoe first so I never drop below 1800 doing snow removal, now. Easier on both me and my SEE, whee! This makes even more sense for the snowblower I want.
Although I think the backhoe could lift the same loads at 1200 (high idle on the HMMH is only 1100 btw), the experienced local advice I've gotten from those I've allowed to operate my FLUs is to
run them at their design max and learn how to feather the controls. New equipment may have eight-way computer-proportional-controlled joysticks to increase productivity, but for precision work these guys prefer old-school hydraulic setups and just love how they can feather the controls on my FLUs because they're "top notch." My crane-operator neighbor prefers my setup for one-off jobs (vs. doing the same thing over and over all day, where he prefers newfangled controls) -- he tells me I bashed my GMCMH ladder with my mtn bike not because the RPMs were too high, but because as a noob I was pushing the levers all the way instead of feathering. Yeah... I can't argue with that... if things are happening too fast, slow down your hand, not your motor.
Then my excavation contractor said the same thing about how I was running the SEE -- lower RPMs lead to bad operational habits, i.e. pushing the levers all the way instead of feathering, and both these guys are saying how sweet my levers are when it comes to feathering and were only pushing the levers all the way part of the time, but were still happy with the performance under full hydraulic power at max RPM (1100 HMMH, 1800 SEE). They don't think I'll ever learn to feather my controls properly, if I compensate for my lack of experience by dialing the RPMs down and not needing to bother. I'm told to only drop RPMs when operating in a tight spot.
I think their point was that I should learn what I'm doing before operating in a tight spot, by learning full-throttle in other spots. Coming from me, this is second-hand advice, but it sounded sensible when I heard it, fwiw.