You seem to have hung up on that one 
I’ve started to extract seed from my dual purpose summer pepo. The goal there is to develop a population where, while keeping the heavy yield as a summer squash, if you miss the harvest window, the “zucchini” will only get sweeter, more orange, and remain firm (in one word, more pumpkin-like), rather than spongy, unappetizing and tasteless. So I want it to benefit from maturing, instead of becoming compost pile material. I have a thread somewhere in which I started to document it last year.
I have noticed correlation that, in pepo, yellow skin (in my population anyway) more often leads to very deep yellow to deep orange flesh in the mature fruit. Very few green or white/tan ones have orange flesh. Further, last year i only had two fruits that had that pumpkin-like orange flesh. Needless to say, they got overrepresented in this year’s sow. This year 80% of my yellow-skinned pepo has that deep flesh color.
Spot the pepo against the maximas!
Hint, I crossed them out.
MANY of them with orange flesh do taste sweeter, but not always, so I do keep the “offtype” green ones and randomly open some because sometimes you discover a gem that doesn’t have that deep hue and yet it tastes sweet. In my trials, very few deep oranges are tasteless, but it does occur. I weed out those now at the seed collection stage.
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Yep I get your points but this marking is not for me as I would like to propose reassemblings on demand, particularly for market gardeners who (most) will never go into landracing with too much heterogeneity as it’s difficult to sell on the market. That’s the idea of this overall “potentialization” of a squash selection’ thing. In other words: how to go from a few nerds in their places, connecting on the internet from time to time, towards a more living thing, embraced by more people, notably small farmers, and then customers. Saying that because none of my friends -small market gardeners around- will go for landracing unless they can see a quite consistent looking production: they wouldn’t mind if it was a bit heterogenous, but the way my grexes look it’s way to diverse for them to sell on the market. So I try to kind of reverse this “handicap” to create an opportunity. And then yes, as I am only marking mother fruits there will be more heterogeneity than what I mark, so a significant selection work to do on phenotype, but then there will be also more vigor and new qualities - or at least it’s what I am expecting.
Then of course, just for me I would as you not care about many criteria: I would just go with taste and keeping quality… that would be enough! I would mark earliness also and that’s it.
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I wholeheartedly agree that, in order to bring in new people, visual appeal is cardinal. Sorry I missed that crucial point!
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No worry friend 
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I saw a documentary on France 5 about pumpkins a few days back, they had one of 1100 kilo’s. It was shown at the competition in the world’s biggest show that happens every year.
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There’s definitely a gap that you identified here.
Market gardeners and even home gardeners tend to want the same kind of varieties they have now, but improved.
vs.
We in this community tend to mix things up a lot do widely experimental crosses.
I see 3 complementary solutions to this:
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We change the market:
Joseph has done ok educating his customers.
I’m sure some restaurants would be fine with heterogenous Maximas to make soups
Bit hard to do at a wide scale. -
We stabilize less-heterogenous landraces/varieties out of our wide grexes. Seems like what you are doing with your project. Might take a few years!
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We proceed more cautiously at the start of our projects.
E.g. the “modern candy roaster” project.
How would you proceed if someone told you they really like Red Kuri squash, but that it needs improvement?
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It’s not that divided in my opinion, even if I understand all your points, for example Joseph favouring long neck moschatas in selection for his chefs, or keeping a fixed phenotype for the Yellow Crookneck, i.e. Just bringing in a few different strains of the same variety and letting diversity in leaves appearances, growth habits, but being strict on phenotype.
I see some in here doing things in between : like the MSPM community seed house being strict on black clubed shaped eggplants and crossing of different varieties altogether.
First move would be saying : I would not be doing anything about his request… Then I think why not crossing different strains of Red Kuri… And eventually go to a grex with nearby phenotypes.
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Just received it! Yolke Colour Fan
I like this tool, I find it nice
Used for eggs usually.
But beware of prices: don’t buy it new. I have been veeeeery lucky finding it at 10€ (more or less 10$). New it costs over 250€!!! Crazy.
I have seen @Joseph_Lofthouse you sometimes use some kind of colorimetric thing, am I right? How do you call that? I haven’t find anything like that yet but I like the idea of havind one stanrdise thing to compare and because our memories are what they are! 
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To my knowledge there was nothing recorded live with the late Brent Loy… But here it is: the ultimate cucurbita genus conference! Great summary of his work - 1 hour :
See the links in the first post to upload his publications
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In this post I have just summarized my year’s selection, following exchanges in this topic which helped me a lot building its design : Direct seed exchange among EU members 2024-2025 - #21 by ThomasPicard
It took me about 4 days running the maxima and moschata selection. Was really enjoyable actually, even if hard work with a deadline which stressed me a bit.
At the end of the day, criteria changed a bit, method also as I’ve needed to simplify some things, but I feel more experienced and that is really great! Now I got a consistent method, to embrace different kinds of projects, from these - let’s say - “meta-populations” assembled for and shown in the International Farmers Seeds Gathering to show diversity first thing.
Now that I am confident in my method, I could handle some crowd tastings.
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Update: one out of sixteen fruits of the Baker Creek Ayote has green flesh. All others, a dark vibrant orange.
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Wow. This is just what I’ve been looking for. Did I miss out on these seeds? Happy to pay postage and handling! By “randomly” do you mean that both moschatas and maximas were growing together with the tetsukabuto?
I meant some plants were in my maxima patch (so 3/4 maxima as far as DNA is concerned) and others in my moschata patch…
I cannot send in the US, sorry, and I have stopped shipping seedsfor this season.
More specifically on that in here: EU: Commercial interspecific hybrids to share (maxima x moschata)
As those stored so well this year they will remain as a separate project aiming at ultra long storage. I mean separate from my moschata and maxima selections: I will plant them separate from those, but interplanted with my very best maximas and moschatas, aiming at restoring fertility either on the maxima or on the moschata side (or in between!?!).
As you can see in pictures, the different f1s look the same, so I would bet there is are very very slight to no differences between mother plants in the prior generation.
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Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. I didn’t realize you were outside the US. Do you know of any US breeders on trying the same thing? i.e. trying to back-cross tetsukabuto hybrids to remove male sterility? I would love to try that, but if someone is already a few years into a project, I’d hate to start from scratch.
I kind of care a little bit about squash shape, but only for one purpose: being able to store as many as possible in as small a space as possible. 
Cylinder-shapes (like zucchini) are quite nice for that purpose. Irregular lumpy shapes are annoying.
But ultimately, I care a lot more about flavor of the fruit (most important factor!), drought tolerance of the plants, productivity of the plants, storage life of the fruit, and how thick the rind is (if it’s hard to cut, I don’t want it!).
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