I appreciate everyone’s answers. Adding a core does not really address the original question, so I will not address it here.
Hanaldo makes an interesting point about the thicker laminate possibly being as stiff as a well consolidated one. The moment of inertia increases by the cube of the thickness, while increasing the resin content will decrease the fiber dominated properties such as tensile modulus. So you gain on one variable, and you give up on another.
I was able to find a paper from Gurit that states that the fiber volume fraction of typical hand layup, such as used by boat builders, is approx 30%-40%. We know that 60% or better is easily attained for high performance composites. Helius Composite software, which uses micromechanics to predict laminate properties, calculates a lamina value of E of 1.63E+07 psi for a 40% fiber volume and a value of 2.4E+07 for a fiber volume of 60%. This was done by a friend using IM7 with 8551 resin. So this is a 147% increase in the modulus by reducing the resin content 20%. This shows the benefits of lowering the resin content- but that should be a given. A CF/epoxy laminate is a combination of the properties of both constituents.
It is clear that a well consolidated laminate offers better mechanical properties than a poorly consolidated one. I was interested in trying to roughly quantify it, though I understand that there are a lot of variables, especially in a laminate that is wet out and set aside to harden.
And, yeah, I was referring to woven fabrics regarding the fact that the fibers in tension try to straighten out when loaded, and this reduces the modulus of the laminate. Of course, there is uni or non-crimp fabrics available that don’t have this issue. But my thoughts still envision a resin heavy composite as having a low modulus at lower loads, and increasing under heavier loading- mainly because the epoxy has a modulus in the range of 1/20th that of an IM carbon fiber, and there is so much of it between the fibers. This would be the same reason that woven fibers perform poorer than non-woven, that is the epoxy allows the fibers to actually move in the matrix as they have tension increased. This movement in the matrix has been studied in woven cloths as it is a common failure point.