Necro'd this thread...
Dichotomy is because pro-tapers on skinny tips can be whippy and amplify unintended spin, and can be more prone to warping. There are options, however.
Small tip pro tapers
Lucasi's Hybrid Slim shaft is 11.75mm with a short pro-taper with a very gentle taper rise, Feels every bit as comfortable to stroke as a long pro-taper but not whippy at all. My main playing shaft right now. (Websites refer to it as a 'euro slim' taper -- it's not)
Katana Bushido 11.5mm tip immediately tapers to 12mm, then that 12mm diameter pro taper runs for another 14 in, for a good stiff hit. As far as skinny shafts go, it's unusually easy to load up a shot with power and trust everything will still go according to plan. Really like that shaft.
Pechauer P+ lite is 11.75mm with a very long pro taper, but whippy as all hell. Very punishing when cuing over obstacle balls and rails or long straight slow-rolls.
Seyberts S-tuned Z shafts are Predator Zs taken down to pro tapers. Haven't gotten to shoot with one (I've owned all the above) but I'm skeptical anything could be worth what that shaft costs...
Solid v. laminated
Laminated ostensibly resists warping and provides radial consistency
Although, I really doubt the real world impact of 'radial consistency' is going to actually show up in any significant way for a skinny shaft engineered to be LD anyway. Most laminated shafts are designed to be LD, but plenty of solid wood shafts have LD ferrules or hollow front-ends. I had a Mezz WX900 which is solid wood and it had very, very low deflection already so the effects of 'radial consistency' were unimportant - hated the steep rise of the conical taper though.
Radial consistency might be more of a factor for 13mm shafts.
Main gripe people usually give is that laminated shafts have less feel and feedback, or a muted hit. It's hard to know if that's from being laminated or the fact that most laminated shafts have other LD features, such as carbon fiber sections or foam somewhere inside the shaft. FWIW, I have found that the less 'pie sections' a laminated shaft has, the less can go wrong with it and the better the hit feels, but this is based on observation rather than scientific data. I think 6-8 pie sections is plenty. One crazy company has a shaft with 64 pie sections... I though that was called 'plywood'....
Do you need LD?
Since you like skinny shafts anyway, you might not need a tech-packed LD shaft. A more traditional 12mm shaft of solid maple, by virtue of being skinny, will have slightly reduced deflection.
What doesn't get talked about enough is that
LD shafts do have their disadvantages -- a traditional-deflection shaft actually has some self-correcting properties if you fudge your stroke a little bit. Just like backhand/pivot english, a slight error as you come through the CB with a traditional shaft can squirt the ball a little bit back onto your intended line. LD shafts don't, so they can punish even little mistakes. Skinny LD shafts particularly can cause you to have to concentrate a little harder when you're in a difficult cuing position or shooting a very long straight rolling shot.
Skinny LD shafts can make it difficult to precisely stun a ball at long distances. That CB squirt off-line when using sidespin that everybody wants to avoid these days? It's because the front-end-mass is driving the CB away from the tip. The same effect happens when you're hitting low-center CB with a normal shaft, except instead of pushing the CB to the side, pushes the CB forward and across the cloth rather than down into it. Skinny LD shafts won't give the CB the same starting push across the cloth when drawing, so when using backspin, the CB experiences more friction with the cloth to start off with, and slightly less forward speed, so you have to start with more backspin and/or a harder shot so the CB arrives on target with the right backspin/skid before friction kills the spin on a long shot or slow table.
Jumps and aggressive close-in masse can be a little bit difficult, as driving the CB hard into the slate requires extra effort with LD shafts. I do find, however, that skinny LDs are very good for predictable semi-masse once you know your shaft and the cloth of the table, as long as you aren't too close to the obstacle you're going around.
Skinny LDs are good when you need to put a lot of spin on a close-in shot and really control where the CB hits the object ball, or for long fast side-spin cuts. But for those of us who don't have the stroke and speed control of an A/A+ pro player, a traditional wood shaft with with reduced but not very very low LD properties might be a good compromise since we may need a little forgiveness from the shaft when we have to take a longer rolling shot or leave ourselves in a harder cuing position.
So I wouldn't overlook a traditional shaft of 12 or 12.25mm, a local cue maker might be able to hook you up.
