That's a great account of how steelheading tactics work in general for fishing below the surface in moving water. It made me think of a couple of things.
First, there's a book by John Judy called "Slack Line Strategies for Trout" that describes in detail the author's failed efforts to sink a streamer on a sinking line. He ultimately concluded that only a floating line with controlled slack got his streamer deep, and he tested the theory repeatedly by using a very bright streamer he could see. It's a great book.
Second, those splicing efforts resulted in integrated lines that, about 14 years ago, everyone started to call Teeny lines, after Jim Teeny came out with integrated heads of 24 feet in various grain weights. They had floating bodies, which you could mend. All the line companies now make them. They may be less flexible and more "generic" than piecemeal additions of leadcore, but they do work, and I've seen really good steelheaders be very precise with them up in BC, getting them to swing at just the right pace just above the bottom of big rivers like the Skeena and Bulkley. Jim Vincent, who founded Rio, was one of the guys who really started playing with splicing lines. In the mid 90s he started making these lines commercially available with interchangeable tips, so that you could have maybe 4-5 sink ranges that could be looped onto you floating body. That was a big step forward.
Although they are more generic, like you say, the current batch of integrated sinking head lines (24-30 feet of sinking head) have been pretty useful for me. Can't say I've tried to be super precise with them, as in calibrating the line to swing right about a 12 foot dropoff, but they help in keeping a fly down either on a swing or on a retrieve. I've mostly used them from boats, where the boat's drifting abnd you're trying to keep you fly down at a level where you think or know fish are. They also are good for beating nasty winds. And, in water that's not really moving, they do keep a fly down on a retrieve really well. They aren't as precise as what you describe at the tailout of that pool, but they do work.
Anyway, great illustration of how techniques developed for one kind of fishing translate to the beach.
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