Well for me the “this recording has more tracks and stuff” is something difficult (time consuming) or even impossible to prove when there are recent merge(s) of potentially old recording(s) merged into a 1 week old (young) duplicate recording MBID.
This MBID has no worth, in this case, it’s better to just take care of keeping the disambiguation comment, period.
But in comparison with this tedious or impossible process, checking row ID by script gives an instant relative age of all MBID in the merge. So I’m using that.
It’s also more fair to target existing ones than duplicates.
About the old MBID that redirect to the merged MBID, it’s true in most cases (browsing MB, web services) but not in all cases, like when the old MBID will never again be queried in third party DB like Flickr MBID machine tags (but it’s something that never really took off) or with the COLLECTION HIGHLIGHTER (but I hope it will be part of MB one day), among other things.