Thank you DevL.
You hit the nail on the head, as usual.
And yes, Simon, they are addressing the symptoms.
The real problem is gas port erosion combined with the short gas system that has perpetually been the cause of these problems for years. The LMT systems do very well with the shorties, but they are still subject to the same issues.
Sullivan and Gwinn designed the D-Fender, RRB buffer, and adjustable gas tube as a system to overcome the carbine gas system's shortcomings, and it worked(works) very well as a package. The RRB and D-Fender are the most popular parts of the package, ironically, even though they are the 2 parts that don't deal with the gas metering. People seem to be a bit touchy about fooling around with the gas metering, so not as many people order the adjustable gas tubes.
If the barrel makers would chrome the gas ports internally, that would go a long way to resisting erosion, and staving it off to much later in the barrel's life. But they don't often(hardly ever) do that, so the 26000psi hot gasses act like a plasma cutter on the gas port and it opens right up in just a thousand or two thousand rounds to accellerate the action speeds. Then these kinds of reliability problems begin to rear their ugly heads. Funny how those shorties start out when they are new, running in full auto around 850rpm, and in not too long they start getting up to 1000rpm or 1100rpm, and people seem to think that nothing needs to be addressed!? It's only when the gun quits working right that it dawns on them that they should be doing something to remedy these increasing action speeds.