A feature of bitcoin is it’s stubborn system stability and resistance to change :)

One of the odd benefits of this is that old forum posts and discussions have a good chance of being relevant.

Although I will say lots of progress has been made in p2p message propagation (since this isn’t directly a part of consensus) which could definitely prevent orphan blocks, so you may be on to something in this case.

Yeah, the biggest effects on the number of orphaned blocks should be the number of distinct mining pools and the latency between them. I could see some of those numbers changing enough to matter since 2013, but I'm not all that sure.