I don't understand what you're saying.

If, for instance, when you Aetherflow for the first time in combat you're only down 300 mana or whatever...then 300 mana or so is waste from Aetherflow regen.

So in this case, the summoning costs ~500 mana, so if you had summoned instead, you'd end up only 200 mana down, so that factors into whether its worth it or not.

This isn't too hard to understand.

Again I'm not disagreeing with your result (mostly because I'm fairly certain doing a normal rotation ends up down more than 300 or so mana per first aether) but your suggestion that mana for AF doesn't matter at all is odd.