After giving more thought to what KrakenPeppers is saying, I could see where there may be some substance to this "loss of vigor". The recent research I mentioned earlier indicated that the clones still carry the original cell clock of the mother. Since peppers tend to taper off fruit production with age, there's no reason not to conclude their successive clones would not exhibit this trait. So they may be losing core structure, but not for the reasons cited of "losing" DNA due to cloning, but rather just because they are old, tired, and degraded in DNA because of their age.
I'm still hanging on to my Dewey Mister cloning station though. It's a nice tool in the arsenal to have.
I broke a main stem on tomato plant few weeks back, but it stayed connected like a 90 degree hinge. I've mended them in the past with a brace, but this one never healed, it was doing fine it just stayed "hinged". So I ripped it up and clipped it at an angle just above the wound, then shoved it right back into the ground. It took off and is doing great, the question is... Is this a clone?