I don't know how you came to that contusion... all the numbers I showed indicate even the worst silicone cable was considerably heavier than the 28ga pigtail.
Simple Ohm's law tells you these should be drawing right around 3A, not 2A. Those 2A pin header connectors are a current restriction, no way around it.
The wiring in my station is shorter than the plug-in pigtails; I reoriented the entire DC-DC converter so the terminal strip is right next to the controller. The original reason for putting 18-20 ga wires to the converter was (A) that's what's on the transformer and (2) the terminal strips need at least 20ga to tighten up properly.
The xformer in my station has an 8A fuse inline in the secondary; the one on the original control board is 7A. this tells me that the old 50W-rated unit used a max of around 6A, which is comparable to the "surge current" rating of most of the 4A SMPS units I've seen being offered for the OLED T12 controllers. As I WAS using a 4A buck converter originally on my Hakk0 OLED T12 and it died after a month, I have to believe that for some time, even if only briefly, current draw exceeds 4A pretty regularly. This leads me to believe design parameters for this station SHOULD be around 5-6A to account for inefficiency. That is why I figured 18-20ga as the "correct" gauge for this application. Empirical Engineering / Deductive Design at work here.
I think we have to think a little differently with these irons; most all our traditional irons are a 50W load operating on ~24VAC, which of course SOUNDS like a nice simple 2.1A.
But to correctly compare to these stations, that really equates to a switched ~38-42V P/P power source operating at fixed 50% duty cycle as compared to the PWM control used here, which is a 70W load operating on a 24V P/P power source modulated at 5-100% duty cycle. Lots more current, especially at high duty cycles.
I think half the problem is that the folks designing these kits are amateurs used to thinking the same way as old, analog 24VAC stations, so they think 2A worth of wiring is plenty without ever looking at a properly designed (okay, probably slightly over-designed) name-brand station.
Or more likely, they get the cheapest pigtails and the cheapest silicone multicore cable, and build a test rig using it. When "it works okay" they figure it's good to sell, even if the wiring is all a great big bottleneck that will eventually start to get hot and increase resistance. But I think 28ga is not even close to a reasonable compromise here.
Of course, the cynic in me says they're using the tiny wiring as a built-in current limiter, to protect sub-standard/overrated PSU and/or switching components in the controller. Hey, designed-in turnover...
mnem
I currently have a 0% duty cycle. And I like it that way.