Keeping stems attached to pieces of the seed tuber itself does provide a head start vs removing them. One aspect of this has not been studied enough, but there does seem to be something different about how stems respond to this process differently when removed from tubers, especially with short season varieties.
The limit with yield is more related to foliage cover, not to seed tuber size or the seed tuber itself. The ideal is achieving complete foliage cover of the soil without planting too close together, so if you can spread out stems from pull starts across a larger area that a single seed tuber offers, you have a chance to have higher yields by multiplying your stem quantity across a larger surface area.
The main issue with using store bought tubers from grocery stores is not that they won't grow, it is disease load. They have higher threshholds for allowing diseases to pass through the system than tubers sold as seed tubers. They are at least one clonal generation older, but sometimes several.
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