Well, that's sort of my point - with how many different items "could" be studied and quantified, not a single study has been produced to measure even one aspect

Well, that's sort of my point - with how many different items "could" be studied and quantified, not a single study has been produced to measure even one aspect just to say "we noticed no discernible change after the freezing process". There isn't even really a good baseline statistic for what the success rate is. In the 30 some years I've been hearing the freezing idea, I find it really peculiar that nothing besides anecdotal evidence, not even amateur studies of just like a server farm testing failing drives or an IT desk recording their attempts that gives a sample size of more than ~10ish. Conjecture and theories are great, and it's good to hear that these drives came back online. But, without exaggeration, I've tried this on hundreds of drives over the course of my career when doing IT support, and I can think of maybe 2 instances when after the freeze, the drive spun up long enough for data t be recovered. And everyone's stories seem to be this way - just this one or two times, after a freeze, it worked. There are no stories where a company comes out and says "man, freezing drives has saved our butts and customer data tons of times!" I can't stress enough that this isn't a declaration that freezing doesn't do anything. But I feel the skepticism is absolutely appropriate given the voodoo qualities of the process and the overwhelming failure rate the process has. The lack of research on it and the fact that it's just a "hail mary" for most people rather than a cemented procedure just seems to me like the procedure is just ceremony, and that if put to any sort of actual trial, the success rate would fall well within the range of chance.