Good points Jeremy. I think you will find that most people in this forum do accellerate enough to keep up with traffic without loss of mpg.

I also generally use a moderate accelleration method, in particular I like to use the assist until I get to about 30 miles per hour, (or 45+ if entering the freeway), and the assist won't kick in under very light accelleration.

Once at freeway speeds however, when driving vaguely DWL'ish over rolling hills I do sometimes put the mpg meter at 40-50. Mostly that fails to maintain speed up the hill (our hills are big) but keeps the loss down enough to not annoy people around me too much.

In city driving however, I fairly often accellerate from about 30-40 miles per hour at 40+ mpgish (when traffic is topping out at around 40ish I can get away with this). Sometimes I can even get away with 60+ mpg accelleration after 30 miles per hour, depends on traffic and I think lean-burn has something to do with it too but I am still not able to do that reliably yet.