If a manufacturer wants to hide a change they've made in order to avoid lawsuits, it is real easy to make the change but not document it via a part number change. They no longer have that alpha suffix they used to add to the part numbers in the old days to signify a change to the part, so it's not as simple to detect changes as it used to be. Even if the part number for the cases didn't change, that doesn't prove there was no change.
I guess we will see how they respond to future failures of the 2017 and 2018 M8's. Will they replace the cases, or just add a cam chest seal? How about if and when they have the first failure of a 2019? Or does that new seal require machining to the case, thus the claim previously about a change to the 2019 cases? Stay tuned.
Btw, it's strange how they heavily implied there was a change made to the 2019 cases when they were dealing with Heatwave's multiple failures, including telling him his last engine replacement had 2019 cases. If an added seal in the cam chest was "the fix", why tell him they changed the cases? Excuse me for being cynical, but Harley has given me and many others a lot of reasons over the years to be distrusting.
Jerry