Perfectly written and excellent excerpt. I am curious about something related to this topic: has anyone done a study on how increasing difficulty might have (or might in the future have) an effect on block regularity? Intuitively, it seems to me that as difficulty continues to increase, eventually the time between blocks will become more irregular due to the corresponding scarcity of hash solutions for higher difficulty levels. Hopefully that day would be in a galaxy far far away, but it would be nice if we have insight on that, and to know where we currently are on the scale of block regularity.