Earliness is a biggest focus of all my breeding, along with flavor. One of my favorite parents to use is Matt's Wild Cherry -- it is pretty early for me, and since it is selected directly from the wild, it is genetically different from most typical garden tomatoes and I find crosses between it and other earlier types often throw out nicely early individuals. One of the earliest tomatoes I've grown is from a cross between MWC and Black Krim. Flavor is also exceptional.
As you allude to, earliness depends both on the time to first flowering, and then the time between flowering and ripening. I have a hunch (just a hunch -- I've no data to back this up) is that faster ripening fruits would also be less flavorful, so I tend to focus on good growers in my very cool spring/early summer weather, and early flowering.
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