Have you ridden an Optimistic or Travis Rice?
I demoed about 20 boards last year. For my riding style, which is bombing groomers or powder in the morning, and then screwing around in the afternoon on natural jumps and park jumps, as well as back country stuff, these two boards were more fun than all those other boards I named.
For instance, you label Mervin's boards as being heavy and dead because of resin. Have you ridden a Ride Highlife? That thing is a freaking plank. Talk about a thick, beefy board, that is so damp you don't even feel the mountain. Yeah, it's stable at speed, but so would be a dresser with the legs cut off.
I honestly wonder if you have ridden the Yes board though, or any for that matter. Because they are about impossible to find as demos. To me, the Optimistic was the best combination of stability at speed, the tech was fun when really pushing the board to it's limit (CamRock), it floated in powder like no other, and for a mid-stiff board, was torsionally extremely quick edge to edge. Very damp, but far from dead. Had great pop. Awesome board. Oh, and edge hold was excellent. Didn't wash once on me. I haven't found a board yet as a bomber that wasn't pure Camber that was more fun. And I mention avoiding pure Camber for the float that the slight rocker provided in powder.
Which also leads me to my next question about Mervin. Did you just ride a Skate and Attack banana? The Attack is using that eliptical design, and isn't the straight C2 BTX. So the stability at speed is not there with the Attack, not like it would be with the Rice or the Banana Magic. It's supposed to be a very loose board, and have some of those skate board qualities, but more stability than the Skate Banana.
I just bring this up because you can't put every board in a box and generalize. I have ridden about 4 different Lib Tech boards, and they all are fairly different. It depends on what you're looking for.
As for the Billy Goat, it's supposed to be one of the most stable Mervin boards at speed outside the Dark Series. And like the poster said above, he lives on the East coast, not Colorado Springs, so I stress you might not fully understand the sheets of ice they get out there. Which I do because I have family out East, and it's brutal. Can tell you a lot of the boards mentioned would wash on ice days. There is a method behind the madness with Magnetraction.