All three of those high school ladies were incredible athletes and they taught me valuable tennis and badminton skills. Not sure what y'all were thinking.

The timing inequalities come from many areas as you've hinted. There are so many possible variations within the components of a single driver alone: permanent magnet, voicecoil construction, driver, spider, surround. Now consider how impossible it is for multiple drivers within a system like the M60 to move in perfect unison. Even if they were impossibly perfect in design and manufacturing execution, once they are placed in a room, room boundary conditions enter into the equations of motion of the drivers and the resulting solutions are non-linear and hence the resulting sound would be distorted in time (phase) and amplitude. Physics always wins!

Add to this the fact that the electrical signal has to propagate through the crossover filter network which introduces frequency-dependent time (phase) delays. Also the components that comprise the filter drift in value not only with time but also volume (gain), temperature and humidity and that drift also affects phase shift.

And yes, all this affects imaging and soundstage. Images may waver in space, they may be indistinct by being smudged together and their shapes may be ill-defined. There is no question any of my v4 speakers are superior to my old v2 in the imaging and soundstage departments. As you move from v4 M3/M50 to M5 to M100, the soundstage expands, you can see more images, the space between images expands and they become clearer. The active LFR takes things to an absolutely superlative level as if the already terrific eyeglasses I had with the M100 were of inferior glass.

The active LFRs are far more accurate. It is as simple as that. Have a look at the frequency response curves of the M5, M100, passive LFR and active LFR. They tell a story. Note how the listening window and sound power curves of the active LFR are nearly identical. Show me another speaker that can do that.

House of the Rising Sone
Out in the mid or far field
Dedicated mid-woofers are over-rated