Agree with everything you're saying.
However it appears that the Pacific Salmon in the Great Lakes will always be little smaller than their Pacific Ocean counterparts probably due to an inferior and less numerous forage base in the Great Lakes. In fact some like the alwives and gizzard shad have a thiamise inhibitor. The pacific ocean forage base and the pacific salmon evolved together.
That said a coho was trapped in the Platte River in the early days of their introduction into the Great Lakes that would have been a world record.
On an interesting note my alma mater in Michigan, Alpena Community College, reared some salmon in a pond before planting them into Lake Huron. This was a year or two before I showed up. Anyway the article I found said they were the first to plant Lake Huron with Pacific Salmon.
