I honestly cant consider this bucket to be too much better than a mystery helmet. The mystery helmets(its been more or less decided) were cast from the pp2 helmet and modified by MS and sgtfang. The MR bucket came from a pp3 bucket that was laser scanned. I do not know how many of you have actually seen a raw laser scan before but its not perfect right off the bat. We use laser scans of celebs at my work for the games we work on. There is a whole lot of cleaning up that has to be done. That and a lot of the time details become soft (not always). So really its possible that the raw laser scan looked a lot like sgtfangs old "lava helmet"
I'm not sure if my opinion would be "expert" or not, but while we've seen evidence that the mystery brands have PP2 similarities/origins, it's
too much to say that they were direct casts of the PP2. Don Post or somebody had to have their hands all over that cast in one way or another. Since the MS1 and SgtFang are identical in every way, that proves that MarrowSun and SgtFang were working from the same kind of buck independently and the ways in which these helmets departed greatly from the PP2 happened long before MS and Sarge got a hold of them.
The dome, the cheeks, the key slots, the brows, on, and on, and on. Only MarrowSun has marketed follow-ons of his MS1 with his own changes. While SgtFang has reported that he, "...scratchbuilt new [ears] after carefully measuring the warped originals..." Yet both helmets have the same ears. So if that is the case, then the ears would be in the re-worked ballpark too (through no fault of Sarge) using only the reference of the heavily modified buck. The "lava helmet" wasn't Sarge's, as you can see in this Fang thread:
http://www.thedentedhelmet.com/showthread.php?t=16461 The "lava" was a different cast that found it's name by TylerDurden and Brak's "back in the day" before my time.
But I know what your saying with regards to scanning...just look at the aft eyepiece on the MR EE-3 scope and then compare that to the original prop, hahaha.