The first sentence of Luce's original post reads: "I want to start a thread for those looking for real tobacco flavors rather than anything artificial/imitation." (emphasis mine)
What follows is my opinion only, since I am fallible and often just full of it.
WTA (whole tobacco alkaloid) is not a flavoring. It's an additive used to "spike" the nicotine impact of an eliquid, to give it more likelihood of producing the "satisfaction" that many people experience from smoking. In his book, Smoking: The Artificial Passion, which was a survey of all the scientific research on smoking, author David Krogh prostulated that smoking was a "normalizing" addiction, in that it helped smokers to feel normal when they weren't otherwise. WTA is a critical component in that normalizing effect. In eliquids in which it is used, WTA does not alter the flavor profile in any significant way. Therefore, it is Off-Topic in this thread---perfectly OK to mention every so often, but not a subject for in-depth discussion here.
TA (Tobacco Absolute) is a flavoring. While not in the same category of straight-ahead food flavorings such as caramel, vanilla, or strawberry, TA nonetheless imparts a definite and recognizable taste in juices in which it is used and alters their flavor profile perceptibly. Thus, it is On-Topic in this thread and correctly fair game for discussion.
From my perspective, we are still in the early days of NETs. As MrMann and VaporMizer both noted, typical NET flavorings made from steeped macerations are a great step forward toward natural tobacco flavors in vaping, but---despite our enthusiasm for NETs and how delicious some of them are---they usually lack something. Yes, to those of us who are denizens of this thread, NETs taste much better than synthetic, lab-based tobacco flavorings, but something is still missing. That something may be impossible to define, since we're not trying to replicate the flavor of chewing raw tobacco leaves. The "complete flavor" to which I'm alluding doesn't yet exist, although we may recognize it the minute we taste it.
I'd theorize that current extraction methods---whether we think of them as cooking, steeping, seeping, leeching, or whatever---are unable to produce flavoring liquids that provide the complete taste we would like. I mean, does anyone here on this thread imagine that we have reached the mountain top yet? My feeling is that we're much closer to the base of the mountain than the summit.
I can easily imagine the possibility that distilled essential oils of tobacco---probably not the commercial version of TA, since that is an inherently idiosyncratic product, but something related or vaguely similar---may yet turn out to provide some of that "missing something" in the flavor profile of tobacco flavor vaping juices. Maybe not tomorrow, and perhaps not with the existing NETs and TA/TE to which we have access today, but somewhere down the road.
But maybe I'm wrong. Perhaps essential oil distillations will prove to be an evolutionary dead-end, and someday we'll look back on TA/TE as failed experiments, mere footnotes in the history of vaping. NET, however, are clearly a step in the right direction, and I'm enjoying them immensely even while I await the next development, whatever it is.
