For a couple of decades, Benchrest has had it's own verson of "Don't ask, don't tell" (really, don't look too hard). I'd bet serious money that over 50% of the bags, esp. front, don't adhere to the rules as written.
Charitably, we go back to "what was the framers intent?" And of course, that was no return to battery, you have to aim each shot. What they made as rules to insure that turned out to be, perhaps, excessive.
As an aside, anybody who has shot a 1K Heavy Gun knows that if it's sandbags, you have to check (1K bag rules allow dual pedestal rests, with no weight limit on the rifle). The rifle *may* return to battery 75-80 percent of the time. But it's no good if 25% of your shots go astray, so you have to check and adjust.
So it gets down to "having to aim EACH shot" -- how to knock out that 75% RTB. If we could come up with a set of rules to insure that, we could rewrite the rules in a coherent manner. But we can't, so we're left with a hodge-podge set of rules that most people don't follow, and a general understanding that the RO won't question certain things.
As I see it, much of the "progress" in rest/bag design over the pas 20 years is an attempt to minimize the need to adjust rests -- aiming -- for bag guns. It's a never-ending battle, and I, for one, can't blame the NBRSA board for not changing the rules. To what? And to what end? Insuring the need to check point of aim, or insuring the need to adjust?
In the end, your question becomes "what will the RO and other competitors not protest?"
