VVT Mechanism

You keep leaning on the possibility of the plunger sticking. I am not aware of that being even an infrequent problem for people racing them, let alone a common one. Failure of the mechanism to adjust cam timing would be very noticeable. If Jim, Chris and others haven’t entirely tuned us out perhaps they will comment.
As for factory changes there are of course many possibilities, cost saving and minuscule improvements to efficiency or emissions being perhaps most common. But as I noted in my first comments, I too considered it likely that in this case it was for reliability reasons and made my choice accordingly. But obviously you missed that as well. As you finally got around to conceding, what they didn’t do was eliminate it, probably because doing so reduces or defeats their goals.