Twas mentioned in the OP--"although that is bogus, since it is now a question of inverter efficiency curves when under load that counts which has nothing to do with their respective stand-by draws."
When the idea is to have the inverter's load at a good spot on the curve, say 70% of the inverter's rating in watts, then if the load is small, it will be closer to the good spot on a smaller watt inverter.
If the TV/DVD is at 80 watts that is going to be at 27% of a 300w and at 4% of a 2000w one. However we don't know what difference that would make in amps from the battery bank in real life since they are both at the low end of the efficiency curve, just not as much with the 300w one.
Meanwhile you are getting "inverter creep" in amps draw rising as battery voltage goes down. So it would be better to have a larger battery bank. Is the inverter creep more than the efficiency savings? Who can tell?
Just more complications for trying to be efficient over a trivial amount of amps. Just watch a shorter movie! :) No movie--read a book instead. Etc.
Or don't worry about it and enjoy your rig. The 41 AH mentioned in the OP for the two-hour movie takes 16 minutes to replace next day using my 155 amps of chargers. How many minutes less gen time would that be if I used a smaller inverter? One minute? Half a minute? No idea, not worth bothering about anyway, that's for sure :)
