Rob Pack's wipeout shape is very similar to that Laver.
Paul, I think the main gist would be that people on here are getting bored with the very concaved shapes that have populated the market over the last 5 years and are drifting back to the Purist / Mjolnir shapes. Whether the rest of the market as a general will follow suit remians to be seen. I had about 10 years away from the game and in 2009 i found that shapes when i came back had vastly changed from the mjolnirs i'd used before, and for a while Kookaburra Kahuna / SS Ton shapes i thought were brillliant, but to me they don't have the playablity of bats without concaving and i've never tried to bat with the edge of the bat. Seems to me that something like Newbery's GT shape is proving a good sort of compromise and Millichamp's series 1 bats a more modern twist on an old shape. So perhaps you are being a bit of an old fuddy-duddy but i don't think you're too far off the mark as to what your target market are after. I personally would like to see more bats in the Screaming Cat series 1 shape, i think the GT may have too high a middle for most English players, though you might want to have a look at H4L's hattori shape as a traditional take on an Asian bat. Of the Asian bats, i think the non concaved, but still quite big edged Tendulkar style BAS bats are a very good shape that offers a long middle but somehow the massively concaved shapes are starting to feel like holding a shovel instead of a bat.