I can tell you why the cutting-mounding technique gives markedly different results from simply tearing the dough: it is because the two techniques are markedly different in microscopic terms. With tearing, you have all the power concentrated in a width about the width of your hand, pulling against a similar handful in the opposite direction. Eventually there is a fissure near the two points of strongest force, and this propagates across the area between the two handfuls, causing them to roughly separate. The entire force used here is tension, and the only working of the dough is pulling to elongate. Now consider the cutting-mounding method. As the blade of the pastry scraper pushes through the wet dough, it occludes to it, pulling the entire width away from itself behind the edge and pushing it into the rest of the dough in front of the edge. This is done over and over and over again. That stretching of the entire occluded surface touching the wet, sticky dough really does quite a lot more work than simply tearing apart. Two minutes of this will produce about 500 of these strokes. That's a lot of stretching and pushing, and that makes for a great gluten development in the dough.

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