15-20 years ago engines did in fact need to be broken in well with dino oil before switching to synthetic. I spoke to an engineer about it once and was told that the microscopic imperfections from the machining process needed to be sheared off cleanly for the engine to break in properly and synthetic prevented that from happening. Think of a lot of little ridges and valleys in the metal which need to be sheared down - synthetic oil can prevent shearing from happening and instead the little peaks get bent over instead of coming off clean.
Later on manufacturers added a finer finishing step that allowed them to ship with synthetic installed. Not all of them did and the reason I was having that conversation with him was he was speculating on why BMW considered burning a quart of oil every 5000 miles to be within spec.
So, I suppose it could be that Ford isn't doing that final step which is why the dino oil and bigger filter. Seems a reasonable hypothesis.
Or that engineer could have been bullshitting me. You never know.