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I'm not sure catching fish is the ultimate test of a good plug (or design).
You can drive a nail with a piece of pipe, but that does not make it a "good" hammer. Likewise, I can catch fish on all sorts of crappy plugs laying around in my cellar, but don't use them because I have other stuff that does the job better.
Certainly catching fish is a necessary condition of a good plug, but it is not the only condition.
Test swimming your stuff gives you invaluable confidence your tool will work the way you want it to when you use it. Each time you get it right you learn something that lets you build better tools in the future.
Fishing plugs well is not a passive sport. You don't throw it out there, reel it in, and hope a fish bites. Rather, you assume the fish are out there and you need to solve the problem of getting them to eat a piece of wood. To solve a problem you need different tools that do different tasks, and you need to know how to use each tool for the task it was designed. No better way than building and testing your own stuff.
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