Hi Leadfoot,
To my mind it's pretty well established that we need to get down to zero as you said so I'm not going to go into the why's much more. The how's though are still being worked on and it's still something which we could probably do with more info on but I'll tell you how I do it and why.
The night before I race I will pre-equalise my cells, I use a Pro Match tray but I have also recently got a Integy zero tray (not the 6 amp version, I'll tell you why soon) so I have two for pre equalising. I just tray them until the lights go off, as I recall this is down to 0.5 ish. This will get the bulk of what is left out of the cells. On the day of the race as I will put my first heat cells on the ICS tray. The ICS changes the amp draw depending on how much is left in the cell and I think that if you put too much of a load on a cell when equalising you will depress the voltage too much. It only does one cell at a time but ripples through the pack many times a second, this means that each cell is allowed to rest for 5/6'ths of the time giving it chance to recover before bieng hit with a discharge pulse the next time. It's very effective for getting every last bit out of the cells. When it is time to start charging I take it off the ics and put it on my charger. I charge at 4.5A to 115 deg F. If it's really cold I go to 110 deg F. The cells I had on the Pro Match tray I move over to the ICS and I put the next pack on the Pro Match tray.
When I finish my heat I will discharge on my Pro Trak at 30A to 4v ( I run 4 cell packs in 12th mod) I check what run time I have left (if any) and I put them in the case and leave them like that for next time.
I don't like to leave the cells with everything taken out of them, weird things can happen to your cells when you do that. I only want to take everything out just before I race. I don't like storing them with nothing in.
This is my theory and it's going pretty well so far, my cells have about 5 cycles on them and I got 4384Mah into my final pack last time i raced.
I hope that sort of answered your questions.
Chris.