No, I don't think that explains what I'm noticing. It's like breaking in a DC motor, if you short the + and - leads together the motor will drag as it's generating it's own breaking voltage. That's what I was trying to test with the steppers with all the phases and commons tied together. What I expected to happen did at first, the stepper was simply harder to turn (independent of cogging) I'm not sure of the RPM as it's geared, but once it was more than a handful of revolutions per second all of a sudden it was like all electric load on the stepper was completely removed like I'd disconnected the wires and the stepper became dramatically easy to turn.