I would think again about the darts. There are too many well-fitting leather jackets without these things. Side panels, centre seam, gussets will do just fine.Shorter darts means a wider angle, and a wider angle causes them to pucker/get pointy. Reducing the angle reduces the curve on the edge and flattens everything out. It's possible to reduce the puckering by forming over a curved... form, but not sure if/how that works with leather, and that may not be an option.
This is about as fitted as possible. If I can move all around with a piece of thick paper scotch taped to me, and it stays put and doesn't even come off (again, scotch tape on a t-shirt; hardly a strong bond), that's really saying something. I had full range of motion with my arms and torso; leaning side to side, touching my toes, arms swinging all the way around. Wife commented at some point that it seems likely the fashion is for a much flatter, looser fit. I will undoubtedly need to loosen it up for ease, but haven't gotten to that point yet.
The understanding of how the darts work, where they need to be and at what magnitude to achieve what effect was the point of the exercise. Now I can play around with them a bit more to loosen things up for an actual jacket rather than a fitted shell.
A bit late, but wife just found this:
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We started with the darts I had in my design, drawn purely by feel and for aesthetics. We then iteratively manipulated them until we ended up where we did, which, coincidentally, is just about exactly what's shown in that link. Wife may have had some clue about that from her sewing exploits, but I had no idea about that general size/angle/location. We clearly just reversed engineered something that is apparently generally well known... Oh well. The point was to learn, and that's what we did. If I had had the vocabulary to find that, maybe we could have saved some trees.