How should variances that still result in prison terms be coded and considered?

I have recently highlighted here and here challenges for the US Sentencing Commission in trackng and coding variances and departures effectively.  In addition, as discussed here, not all variances are the same of should be coded and considered equally since large variances pose a much greater risk of disparity than small ones.  Indeed, in reading newspaper accounts of some federal sentencings, I detect a pattern in which judges may be granting variances but still imposing significant prison terms on first time offenders.  This story of the sentencing of a Hawaiian state representative and this story of the sentencing of two Los Alamos lab workers seems to fit this mold.  It will be interesting to see whether and how the USSC will be able to capture in its variance data that significant prison terms were still imposed in a number of variance cases.