In the beginning...
I never pondered that a pipe could influence the tobacco, or that the tobacco would flavor a pipe with subsequent blends. I was simply trying a few different blends & getting my feet wet.
Later I began discovering that the same blends tasted different in different pipes. This encouraged both reading about others experiences with the phenomenon, as well as fueling my personal exploration. But the results remained mysterious for some time.
Now I have a sense of what type of blend a particular pipe might do well with before I begin. Mostly I'm right, sometimes I'm wrong.
As it is now, some pipes got dedicated to a particular blend, mostly from some whimsical reason about how the 2 play together or how / when I first used them together.
Some of my pipes I liked from the beginning, and they smoked well enough, but just weren't quite "right", and I may have tried a dozen blends in one until it behaved the way I preferred, and the 2 got paired up.
I also have some workhorse pipes that I will sometimes go back and forth between English & Virginia blends, enjoying the lingering but receding flavor of the previous style.
Yet others are simply used within the confines of certain genres.
And yes, I do find that pipe / blend combinations can provide VASTLY different experiences and I tend to do what I can to pay attention and replicate the better experiences as best I can.
Mostly, still enjoying the adventure of the variety all the way around. By paying attention to my taste experiences and carefully reading about contents and reviewers ratings, I've found that I enjoy most blends that I open, as long as they're in my preferred genre.