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@Greenbank
SWOLF: I don't bother with it, it's not really granular enough. If you ever get to the point where this kind of stat is important then just look at distance per stroke. Garmins give you number of strokes and distance, so divide the two (and halve it again because it's only counting one arm). Anything less than 1m per stroke and you need to work on your technique (most likely) and power (secondary).
As Colm89 says, paddles are there to get your muscles used to pulling harder. Build up your shoulders/arms and then you can pull harder with each stroke, which means you either go further with each stroke or you're more efficient and use less energy to go as far as you did before with each stroke. Think of them as roughly analogous to running with weights or dragging a tyre or a mini drogue-chute or similar.
I'm at the "time in the pool" stage of getting back into swimming fitness. I don't need to do anything more than build up to being able to do ~4000m in one go non-stop (which is my own personal benchmark based on the distance swimming I tend to do). Once I get to that then I can move one of my 3 weekly sessions to focus on drills (with stuff like paddles, leg bands, focusing on improving breathing, stuff like this), and then the 3rd session a week moves to the equivalent of intervals (e.g. forcing myself to do shorter sets at faster than normal pace, with short recovery periods in-between, in order to get my speed up.)
It's not scientific, but it works for me, my ideal week becomes: