Craig Dobbelyu wrote: AND... The results are the same: Tomato don't fall over!
...and yet you skipped right over needing to tie the tomato in in this analysis, though it does figure in your first reply. Twisting and tying. Pruning, perhaps. Every few days when the growing is good. They are not peas, hops, beans or grapes - even melons do a better job grabbing onto things.
Put up a cage around a tomato, it grows up and fills the cage. No human intervention is required. The occasional leader may go sideways and break, but a sucker will fill the cage. If you have time to fiddle, you can push the leaders back in if they go astray, and prune if you like, too. But you don't have to, and you still end up with a cage full of tomato plant, and tomatoes in and out of it.
Put up a stake by a tomato, AND...it falls over, runs across the ground, and sets fruit on the ground.
Unless, of course, you want to
spend time throughout the growing season holding it up. That adds up to a HUGE amount of time. Tiny bits of time, but many, many tiny bits of time.
Cage - End of season, pull up the whole thing, pull the plant out the bottom - 15 seconds, tops; 5 if you don't wait once it's dead and let it get crunchy.
If it takes you hours to make tomato cages from 6 inch remesh, you're doing it wrong. Measuring 8 feet is about as hard as counting to 16, and takes even less time than that after the first piece is cut.
But hey, do what you like, no offense taken - there's plenty of folks that love to fuss with tying tomatoes to stakes. I'm comfortably not one of them, because the way I do it is is FAR less work. I prefer to spend my tomato plant time picking fruit.
