I can't tell anything from your pictures, but here's what I know.
First of all, the majority of brace wood billets I've bought from luthier suppliers have been pretty terrible in terms of runout, and don't split well at all.
Second, I don't know how Cumpiano gets his spruce to cleanly split braces off the edge of a billet like that picture in the book. It works much better if you split the billet in half rather than near an edge, so the stiffness of the two halves balance. Otherwise the small piece bends more and the split wanders.
Shane at High Mountain Tonewood has great bracewood billets, which are the split off wedges left over from making rectangular soundboard billets out of a round tree
They're pretty big so it takes some effort to do make first couple splits, but there's much less waste than using small sawn billets with major runout.
