G'day dun-king!

I have a 13m Diesel with autopilot disengaged and, without looking at it, what you say sounds about right. It's the bridle system that makes that happen though, not the pig tail. If you pull on the front line so that it slides through the rings on the tip of the kite as far as it can, both the front and the rear end points on the bridle end up about the same distance from the wing tip. When you pull on the rear line only, the autopilot system allows this all the slide the other way which puts tension on the line that runs along the TE making it scrunch up to help with relaunch. It also slows the responsiveness of the kite down.

From my limited experience (5 months), if you are using it with sufficient wind for it's size, the Diesel relaunch is super easy, even with auto-pilot disengaged. It's much more responsive to fly with it disengaged so I suggest buy some pig tails to disengage the auto-pilot with and try it. If you prefer to use autopilot again it's simple to change it back again.

The shop you get the pig-tails from should be able to show you how to disengage the autopilot. If not, email me and I'll send you some pics of mine to show you.

Cheers,
Salty