In fact, I was able to collect evidence for either case: 1) year old queens always outperform older queens vs 2) queens are fully capable in their second year. (References available on request). 

Its not surprising you caould swing it either way.  The simple reason is our measurement criteria is complete crap.  We have to be honest,  we have, as an industry,  nothing on place as a standard.   In fairness the weather and nectar flows effect a hive a lot more than queens do,  but lacking a clear cut standard its all pure observation and complete bias on display.  With no way to correlate brood quanity with feed input,  its at best a WAG.





Pre-emptive requeening, while practiced by many large scale beekeepers, might not be cost effective if the increase in production is not great. The money and labor might be better spent some other way (eg, use the new queens to increase the number of colonies).



I had a very interesting AHA moment this season.  Visiting one of the largest queen guys in the country this year,  when he told his crews to get rid of all the 2-3 year old queens.  This was a huge surprise for me as most queen guys I know change their queens more than their underwear.  It had been standard for this one to have 2/3 year old queens all thru the package season.  Only failing queens replaced. He considers honey production the "rest time" for the bees,  so he wanted fresh queens in every hive so he had time to evaluate them for next spring.  


I thought that was quite a surprise from what I had seen elsewhere,  2/3 year old queens still in use, as a standard.




Charles

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