Swap disc questions

So I recently picked up a new Saturn as my old one had stopped working quite some time ago. I believe the laser had just stopped reading anything, but I can't recall if that was all that was wrong.

Anyway, I use to do the swap trick all the time and had been fairly good at it (power up with burned disc, swap with real disc for security read, back to burn for game load) but it wasn't exactly a relaxed procedure. This time, I discovered the KD0x discs and I'm wondering why this isn't just "the" standard way of swapping discs.

I've disconnected the door sensor and have my own switch routed outside the case (no wires cut, just connected my own wires to the connector and rerouted), so my current method is: Power up with no disc. At the menu, insert KD0x and close the sensor switch.

At this point it will read a bit of data, and then try to seek somewhere in the data section 10+ times. At any point during this extremely lengthy seek I can swap out for a legitimate disc, it will read the security ring, and then stop the disc on its own. From that point security is effectively disabled. I can open the sensor, put in any burned disc, close the sensor, and start it up.

Is there any negative aspect to doing it this way? Why would anybody try to do multiple time-sensitive swaps when this method is this easy? I'd originally come across this method as the "Rings of Saturn" method but didn't have anything at-hand that would let me create a mini-disc safely. Finding out that it never tried to seek to the security ring until the swap completed was a happy bonus.

For a more dev-focused question, does anybody have a link to the documentation on exactly how these system discs work? I came across some limited info in my searching, and my understanding was that there's no actual executable data that gets read, and it's some sort of info in the header that puts it into this state? Anything concrete instead of half-remembered partial information would be appreciated.

I've also ordered an Action Replay 4M Plus so that I can stop swapping at all as it's my understanding that swapping is bad for the drive. Is it the physical act of stopping the motor that causes the damage, or something to do with laser intensity while it searches for nothing?

Another question about the Rings of Saturn method - what is it that tells the drive to stop spinning when it detects nothing and can that be induced without the disc actually missing? I tried to put a layer of cardboard where the sensor would seek to read the security ring and it didn't have this same behaviour, so it seems to know the difference between 'something with no data' and 'nothing there at all'. Could a reflective surface over the lens fool it? This approach would obviously be limited by the extremely small distance between the lens and the disc.

And my last question in this ramble, my reading has led me to understand that a large portion of the security on discs is caused by the wobble in the data track. This wobble is, for obvious reasons, difficult to recreate on the disc itself, but could it be recreated by the original method of generating this signal? Actually wobbling the drive during a read?

Does it have to be a very specific wobble to pass security, or would the signal it looks for be generated by booting the machine up on the same table as a running paint mixer?

Any answers or comments are appreciated. I'm extremely interested in all of this, and while I don't believe I'll ever have the time to contribute to the Saturn community in any significant manner (PS3 is my current focus) I do like to keep up with the state of things on all my favorite consoles.
 
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