Scott,
I'm not that comfortable disagreeing with someone with your extensive knowledge, but since this could be a serious safety issue, I feel that I must ask you to review the Odyssey tech documents related to capacity and its relation to load. I believe that you'll find that the 16AH rating on Odyssey & similar batteries is the '20 hour rate'. In other words, divide 16 by 20, and that will tell you how many amps you can use to get a full 16AH out of the battery.
I'm looking at the Odyssey PC680 doc right now, and you can draw only 0.8amps continuous, over 20 hours, to get the full 16AH out of the battery. To last an hour, you can draw 12.3amps, which yields only 12.3AH total from the battery.
This is a big deal if someone with an electrically dependent a/c isn't aware of the fairly steep capacity curve with increasing loads.
Link to the Odyssey document:
http://www.odysseybattery.com/documents/US-ODY-TM-002_1214.pdf
I do agree about the very limited usefulness of current measurement during actual a/c operation.
Charlie