Gareth, nice post. A couple of BTW's:

Towards the end of 1944, the Luftwaffe did have a night fighter, the Heinkel He219 "Uhu" (="Owl"), which could just about keep up with a Mosquito, and shot down one or two which were caught napping. This was a rare event, though.

The bomb load of the B Mk 1 was originally 500lb. (2 x 250lb). They found that by cropping the vanes of the 250lb bomb, that they could get four, rather than two into the bomb bay. The B Mk XVI had bulged bomb bay doors, and could carry a single 4000lb "cookie" (also known as a "blockbuster"). The FB Mk VI could carry only two of the cropped 250lb bombs, as the forward part of the bomb bay was taken up by the cannon breeches and ammunition boxes. The FB Mk VI could also carry 8 rockets, under the wings.

One version, the FB XVII, carried a 57mm (6-pounder) gun in place of the normal armament. This was useful for putting holes in surfaced U-Boats from outside the range of the U-Boat's own AA weapons.

The Germans tried copying the Mosquito, but found they could not make a suitable glue. There were several versions of the Mosquito made in Canada and then used in Burma where the climate could not have been more different; some of these lost on operations may have come "unstuck", for the same reason.

Atfer the much-publicised fatigue failures of the de Havilland Comet in the 1950's, and a spectacular structural failure of a de Havilland Vampire at an air display, it was frequently observed that de Havilland never made an aircraft that didn't come unglued at some point in its service career. This isn't quite 100% accurate, but it contributed to a design leader slowly being relegated to a mere parts assembler.