I prefer the shade, but the panels and wife prefer the sun....I'm outnumbered. :)
The panels I'm looking at have VMPP @ 18.5v and IMPP @ 8.65a I thought bigger was always better. :B
My limited understanding of bypass diodes was that (besides the blocking function)they isolated shading losses to cells that had those diodes. If a 4 x 9 array of 36 cells had 36 diodes, any one cell could be shaded and all others would still pass power. If the panel had just a couple of diodes a whole row or two's power might be blocked just because of shading on one cell. This may be an oversimplification....or....just totally wrong, but it's what I've been led to believe and why I wonder why there's not more emphasis placed on panel diode quantities.
Nice on the panels. If you were to use 36 bypass diodes on a 36 cell 12 volt panel it would be useless for charging a 12 volt battery. The voltage loss using that many diodes would be to great to work. That being said there are "active diodes" but this stuff is on higher voltage panels and costly. As they are really a low loss circuit could be incorporated in every cell Connection. But again there is no real "cost effective" reason to do this on a 12 volt panel.