Mark Keith wrote:
"My dipole on 40m was only 35-40 ft. Not 1/2-wave up. But not once did
it ever beat my vertical long haul."

I believe Mark. The scales may be tilted in the favor of Mark`s vertical
by the high-conductivity soil at Mark`s QTH.

Commercial stations spend what it takes to put those horizontal antennas
up at elevations which bring the take-off angle down low enough to reach
out the distance to the target area.

At high elevation, a dipole becomes bidirectional in azimuth. This gain
is often enhanced by a reflector, directors, extended element lengths,
or additional in-phase elements. Curtain arrays are popular transmitting
antennas. So are rhombics, especially for point-to-point, for both
transmission and reception.

Receiving antenna farms rely on rhombics, Beverages, fishbones, etc,
where the object is directivity and gain to give S/N, if not efficiency.

Best regards, Richard Harrison, KB5WZI