So generating a surplus of 4/sec which is enough to fill a 100 wu cache every 25 seconds. That's fast. But with 162,000 active hosts, it will take a while to get ahead of the pack.

As long as it continues to produce work at that rate. Sometimes it's faster, but at other times (like the most recent update) it's slower.
Only 26/sec. Nowhere near faster enough.

The splitting rate shown is an instantaneous figure, compared to the long (hour?) sample used to generate the return rate. As I type the splitting rate is over 35/sec, so should be "more than capable" of keeping up with the demand (based on the results returned), which is just over 31/sec.

Well, this has been interesting. My Windows 10 machine has a full cache of work. My Windows 7 machines have zero GPU work. Looks like the outrage is going to cause at least a 3-4 day lack of GPU work for my fast machines.

The SATA-to-Molex cables are to power the card through the PCIe x16 connector, like the MB would if it were plugged directly to the MB. The male SATA connecter gets plugged into one of the SATA female plugs on the power supply's SATA connector cables. Spread them out on as many SATA cables as possible, they draw up to 75 watts each.

Can you tell me what is the use of a 'SATA 15pin Male to MOLEX 4pin power cable' ?
Where do you connect the SATA 15pin Male ?

I've no idea who this Dr Grey is, but what I do know is that I would back Jason and Raistmer aganst his technical ability any day. Have a look at his team name.

This imply assumption that maintenance time directly depends on database size.
And that database size directly (or largely enough) depends on mean deadline time.
Second assumption looks very unjustified for the reasons listed earlier. First assumption requires some proofs too.
And third assumption is that if deadline shrinkage will take place it will automatically lead to number of tasks per host limit rise. Hardly...

The current deadlines for completion will continue to grow to be further away from the time taken for the bulk of canonical results to be achieved.

1) Deadlines will not grow. They will remain the same.
2) So what? Why this bother? Did you ever observe new version roll up where BOINC mis-predict estimated time to completion? With shorter deadline % of killed tasks will be even higher. So, all this just to make credit accounted faster for those over-competitive ones who can't just leave host as it is and spend time on optimization instead of credit rise watching? It will accounted eventually - that's all what matter.

Regarding real time processing: we do only pre-process. Final processing is Nebula. And it requires data movement into Atlas. This SETI search isn't real-time one by design. Its sensitivity comes from data accumulation over few observations spanned by years. Real-time processing just self-imposed goal, not really required for this kind of search. Would be good to complete search faster, but cutting some processing power will not make it faster, it will make it slower. Particular result mean validation time isn't matter. There are millions of such results.

As soon as we adopt the intentions of the technology vendors at present, then more than 95% of our hardware compute capacity is immediately defunct. It would be nice if we could all have shiny new Kaby Lakes and GTX 1080s, but it's not realistically going to happen... especially when the gains represent poor return for the money. They need to do a lot better before we can say goodbye to stuff that works.