Flying wires vs. lift struts

I emailed Dave at Fisher Flying Products asking about the lift struts I have seen used on several Celebrities that I’ve seen in pictures.  I still have not seen an actual Celebrity “in person”, nor any other completed Fisher design for that matter – just a partially built single seat ultralight at Oshkosh.  It seems you have a choice between lift struts or flying wires.  Personally, I like the look of flying wires a lot better.  It just has that classic wire-braced biplane look.  I know that a cylinder shape, such as a wire, has much higher drag than streamlined tubing.  A cylindrical object will have 10 times the drag of a streamlined shape of the same frontal area.  The wires, however, will be much thinner than struts, 5/32″ — meaning that they would produce drag roughly equivalent to 1-9/16″ wide streamlined struts.  BUT…  the plans call for 1-1/8″ and 1-1/4″ round tubing for the lift struts.  The flying wires would have far less drag than those.  I could probably replace the round aluminum tubing with smaller streamlined steel and pick up some drag reduction there, but the fact remains — I just don’t like the look of the lift struts.

It’s not like this airplane will be a speed demon no matter what I do, so I’m not really worried about what may be a small drag penalty for the wires.  If I wanted to fly faster and more efficiently without regard for anything else, well, I have an RV-12 for that (acknowledging that “faster” is entirely relative here).  It looks like I can have the wires made to my specs by Aircraft Spruce, swaged and tested with professional equipment so I don’t have to worry about getting it perfect on my first try.