Are the 1430s the most likely date range for the Zodiac drawings?

[Koen G]

There are two different arguments being conflated here:
a) Is the VM a derivate work of the Lauber style?
b) Can the VM illustrative style be used to attempt to date the period which they represent?

I fail to see why attempts are being made to link one to the other.

The whole problem with this thread is that Mark isn't motivated by curiosity, he is motivated by getting the assessment as close to his preferred date as he can. Not content with my repeated assurance that "sure, it can be as late as you want", he now wants the "most likely date range" to be later, and he is muddying the waters in the process by conflating all kinds of different arguments.

Lauber has a very specific style, and the VM does not have that style.
Lauber does use a "family" (this is not the ideal word) of images which the VM also seems to have used, but everything suggests that the VM tapped into that stock (or a distant branch from it) earlier than Lauber did.

Now looking for baggy sleeves in Lauber (which I already marked as an exception, an easy to spot separate case) is redundant. For every one of those examples, there are several dozens in pre-1430 manuscripts! And this is why I find this thread annoying, because Mark said "let's pick some cherries", and like that we lose track of the bigger picture. What I did in the original thread was ask everyone to give me all the examples they could find. And then a clear picture emerges: this style belongs to 1400-1430. This was confirmed by expert opinions. What Lauber did was pointed out by me, but it is irrelevant, since the VM does not use any of the post-1430 fashion Lauber does use. And again, Lauber is a very special case with an easy to recognize style (just like De Grassi is an easy to recognize case pre-1400). 

Note that in the original post I also cross-checked with the exact style of the female dress, which turned out to be even more centered in the 1400-1430 period (although people were struggling to find a ton of examples). I don't recall we found any in Lauber.

So my assessment was made after I set up an experiment to prevent myself from cherry picking and I tried to take in several variables. This is the opposite of what's happening here.