My take on this is, the shop where US gets the hilts made, accidentally made a batch with an incorrect template in their software. This possibly could have happened when US commissioned the V5's mock-up and the shop used the V4 template as a base. The accident could have happened because if you don't store a backup off the design computer, then you make an alteration and save it but not renamed, it overwrote the original. I've seen that happen all the time with CNC and HAAS designing. Most software engineers will use an existing template for milling machines because all the start and end points are already mapped and makes altering for a different design quicker and less buggy.
I hate to admit this, but my shop does this, A LOT. We clone existing templates, alter them to fit a customer needs, then push the design thru and make a mock up for them. The issue happens for my shop because our backup storage automatically saves projects every 15 minutes, so if we're not careful, the open projects overwrite the original and we lose the first template. We have removable storage backups that are supposed to be unplugged to preserve the originals, but mistakes do happen.
Same this with our software for custom machines. We've gone thru many updates for our servo and test bed equipment, but every update is built on the original and not written fresh. It's sloppy, clunky and storage intensive, but if the code doesn't work, the bad sections are isolated and new code inserted till it does.
Agreed. It's a more viable chance to happen and accidents happens. US being US will still get them out to us and I think error or not, they're still cool. Makes for great discussion