The theory (a 1/2 impact doesn't make any real difference when you are dealing with 1/10th drops based on distance) - doesn't match up with reality.
As one who has run a 1-Watt 900 Mhz Wireless Mesh omnidirectional network over distances of about 8km, I can tell you that the splitter that drops your power in half on the transmission/receive side, has a huge impact on networks that are close to the edge of your receive sensitivity. Enough so that we took some equipment that incorporated such a split in the signal strength, and sent it back to engineering for a 9 month spin to remove such a splitter. 1/2 drop = 3dB loss.
If you have a receive sensitivity of about -102 dBm, and your signal is just on the edge at -100 dBm, and you inject a splitter (a 3dB loss) - you lose a good chunk of your transmitters. It's the difference between being able to run a 4km hop and an 8km hop.
Here is my favorite tutorial on "how far" - it walks the right line between theory and practice.
To reiterate (because although I had the same thought as you it took me a moment to realize what you meant), OP is measuring the wrong thing for multi-user scenarios. Losing 10 ft from 1000 ft radius due to a 20% power loss might sound inconsequential (only 1%, right?), until you realize that's ~31,000 ft². That's ¾ acre, or 20% of your users. Nothing to sneeze at.
In my scenario, I'm saying the addition of a diplexor (in this case, a single antenna port to serve both 900 MHz, and 2.5Ghz, so the signal was split to two RF chips - about 3 dB of loss) - the typical distance at 0.1% BER, with the exact same antenna gain, Free Space Loss, LMR400 loss, etc.. dropped from 8 km radius in all directions down to a little over 4 km radius.
As one who has run a 1-Watt 900 Mhz Wireless Mesh omnidirectional network over distances of about 8km, I can tell you that the splitter that drops your power in half on the transmission/receive side, has a huge impact on networks that are close to the edge of your receive sensitivity. Enough so that we took some equipment that incorporated such a split in the signal strength, and sent it back to engineering for a 9 month spin to remove such a splitter. 1/2 drop = 3dB loss.
If you have a receive sensitivity of about -102 dBm, and your signal is just on the edge at -100 dBm, and you inject a splitter (a 3dB loss) - you lose a good chunk of your transmitters. It's the difference between being able to run a 4km hop and an 8km hop.
Here is my favorite tutorial on "how far" - it walks the right line between theory and practice.
http://www.afar.net/tutorials/how-far/