I can only speculate on my past experiances, surely I would need to experiment with my footpocket to get some hard results.

While making my new fin, I became very closely familiar with our old alas, materials, quality of tooling and attention to detail in the production. To my surprise, all this is only marginal at best of my judgement, leaving me with some strange looks on my face... The feel and performance of alas is unproportionally excellant, compared to how unperfect they are made.(I'm talking about graphite ala, the black's are even worse) But a salute goes to the main designer, no question about it!

But here's my thoughts about footpocket. First, the footpocket should be customised only for the part of enclosement, that is for the usual part of fingers all the way to heel, but no further. The molded custom made footpocket presents a few new questions. In my view, such a design would need to have 2 different types of material used. One for the fin, as it needs a specific hardness and another, softer material for the contact with skin-foot. That goes only to the inner part of the footpocket, not the whole part of the footpocket - outer side would still look as it is. This softer material should be thin, not to interfere with forces projected on the fin, but to allow some comfort level to the foot.
Basically from finswimming, I can conclude that best forces are applied through extremly hard fit to the foot, something that has to be compromised with comfort in uwh, for the reasons of manuverabillity, and longer wearing times.
This I hope I can achieve by using custom molded footpocket, and by that maximise the grip, while the fin would press against the foot evenly, but not press as much as with finswimmers-mono footpocket.
The part at the heels could be also customised further, as when or if the player would like to have a harder grip, this would be done with smaller heel radius, like with finswimmers heel strape-belt. But If I want to make it this way, I'd probably need to put some free spacing at the point of the fingers, with conically designed shape to allow for harder fit to happen without compressing the fingers at the tips. Then again, I might not need to change anything.

@atapene - What you are thinking, might present a problem. Although, one's feet are able to move more becouse of material of the fin, and not so much becouse of free space in the footpocket. Leaving just a little spacing in front of the fingers, would probably solve this potential issue, probably without any bad sideaffects, with only marginal work on my part, when doing the fin. This is what I call fine tunning the mold, but for molded footpocket it would be done once - I mean, I would know how to remake each mold, and it would be proportional for all other players molds.

Well, these are my start ideas... as I said before, such design could be optimal without any changes, or it may need some adapting. I need to test it first... and not only me! One thing that I dont doubt about, is that custom mold can be done, without so much hustle on my part, that I would have to put up some crasy price tag for it. For now, I'm still fighting with the normal fin problems!

@duck - dont you go sending me any of that porcelain feet of yours! If this thing is to work, the mould would have to be made under correct position, and I dont know what that is, yet. And ... I cant use porcelain! Pre-mentioned skin-mold would have to be done right and shipped over to me, or my ass would need some serius air miladge. Anyway, this custom footpocket solution is only intended&needed for the top-end players.... worlds should do!

@freedivenz - How did it go with monofin? Have you tried it? And I agree with your upper assesment completly.