Yea, I wish we had access to Ford's data. The 600 hundred (or so) threshold is a small number in the scheme of things. For instance, all you would need is 12 Raptors per state to reach such a number. With a majority of Raptors being owned in states like Texas, California, and so on, the 600 number is attainable. Though none of us know 600 people, who have had an issue, it still does not mean that such a threshold has not or will not be exceeded. Your method of reasoning is at least plausible.
FWIW, there are 6 Gen 2s and 2 Gen 1s in my parking lot. The only issue I'm aware of was water intrusion on the site manager's truck. The rest of us have had no problems.
I'm a member of most (if not all) the Texas Raptor groups, and was including those reports in my assessment. Maybe 30-40 reports from Texas? At least 5 with repeat failure, and two with 3 failures. Texas has the most trucks by a large margin IIRC.
I'm not saying my method is flawless, but I've yet to see anything better, and I get tired of people acting like every third truck has this problem when in reality that's not the case.
also the cam phaser issue goes back to 09 when the 3.5 was released, Ford has said there would be updates to help the engine but so far all we've seen is lip service, no part numbers have changed to prove they've fixed anything. so while rtmozingo uses 1% as a figure then assumes 800 trucks is too many to have this issue is funny.. since Ford sells nearly 500k F150s a year, since 2009 they've sold 5 million trucks. Ford claims in 2017 65% of all F150s were ecoboosts, while Ford doesn't disclose how many F150s are sold they have said before they average 500k. so 65% of 500k? 300,000 ecboboosts sold. only 1% failure? that's still 3,000 trucks just for 2017. that doesn't include every other year and is still more than the 800 he claims.
The cam phaser problem is not just an ecoboost one. Ford first had it on their V8s, and many other manufacturers have the issue. The problem (except in rare cases) is not the phasers themselves - if it were, we'd not see reoccurence. The issue is that upon startup the phasers are starved of oil, and compensate timing due to erroneous oil pressure. It has been postulated by several others - and I agree - that clogged oil ducts or something similar is causing the issue in the affected trucks, and the phasers are the ultimate failure point - not the cause.
The other thing to consider too is how will the Gen 2 engine age after the warranty is up. On the 04-08 F150s, Ford was plagued with the timing chain problems on the 5.4 V8. Such issues don't fully manifest themselves until an engine has been on the market for several years. IF the cam phasers become more of a problem as a Gen 2 Raptor ages, then that would be problematic given that there are at least 60k Raptors on the market that have the potential for such issues.
And as you have noted (and others have too), this issue was known going back to the 09-14 Ecoboost engines. It just leaves me scratching my head that Ford would allow this to continue for 3 years on the Raptor—much less a decade on non-Raptor Ecoboost engines.
Which further indicates the issue is not a design one, but a manufacturing one. I hear that many of the oil ducts are very small, so small that a tiny piece of debris would be enough to lead to this issue. The new parts just increased the time before failure as best as we can tell anyway.
With that said, I know of two Gen 2 Raptors driven hard with over 100k with no issues. One in particular goes 10k between oil changes and has 130k on his. I've seen 10 Ecoboost F150s with over 300k on reddit, who all claim nothing but normal maintenance.
