David,
I am probably out of date on golf balls. After doing some searching on the web, it appears that both Pinnacle and TopFlite have softened their balls from the good old days when I used to blast away with them.
With three piece balls available for some time now, I dropped using TopFlite rocks quite awhile ago first for Strata Pros, and then TopFlite Tours and TopFlite Gamers.
I was going to point this out, but I guess you beat me to it.
The Pinnacles and Top Flites of today (or probably the last 15-20 years) are nothing like the Rock Flites of the early 80s I remember and everyone who was even remotely close to decent used to joke about.
When I first started and became halfway decent, I was playing wound three piece surlyn cover balls, not balatas. Heck, back then I remember it was pretty easy to cut the cover of a surlyn ball with a mishit, let alone what it would do to balata, so it was purely a financial decision. When I'd run out of "good" balls I'd play whatever I found, which was sometimes Top Flite type balls. I don't remember them going any further at all. Had they done so, I'm sure I would have considered using them on par 5s to increase my chances of going for the green in two (back when eagle putts were rather more rare than they are today)
When I was in college in the late 80s, I started playing balatas, at least when I was hitting it well. I don't remember any real difference in driving distance between them either, but maybe the Top Flite was already being improved, or more likely the fact that by then I was using a 6.5* driver meant I had "optimized" my equipment for the high launch high spin drives I hit - perhaps if I used a Top Flite with a 9* driver I'd have seen it go further.
At any rate, I'm highly skeptical of suggestions that an old Top Flite is anything remotely like a Pro V1. Perhaps that is true for certain people, but I can state with certainty it was by no means universal. The distance benefits of the Pro V1/V1x, by contrast, to seem to have been rather universal for those of us with swing speeds well over 100 mph.