Compared to using a knife at an angle , which looks more like a blind child did it yes I would say they are 90 percent the same size . And I do get away with cutting the horizontal ones first , never tried the other way .
Come to think of it , you may not get as even if the vertical is already cut as there is less solid mass to hold the wire in the same plane
I also spent many hrs making and experimenting with multi wire horizontal cutting , my opinion is that the smaller the batch and the rounder the pot the less likely it is to work. I also found it abuses the curd too much for my liking . ( I have some pretty high tech equipment to make them so it was not for lack of quality ) and now I see why they charge so much for a commercial one.
I think that as a commercial maker the curd tearing to time saved ratio is probably acceptable , imagine cutting 100 gallons 1 slice at a time . The cheese would have fermented before you were done.
As home makers have the luxury of no labor cost and a small enough batch that it takes only minutes to cut with out mesh cutters .
The rotary cutter I use takes about 1 minutes to cut 3 gallons