Oh man, I hear you but I gotta push back a little here. In my experience, being off level on a tight jobsite is one of those things that can bite you way harder than people think. I've seen guys skip the level step to save time and then have a load shift because the machine settled into soft ground mid pick. Your old timer's method is smart for sure, but I'd argue it's not about speed it's about avoiding a wreck. Take this with a grain of salt, but I've been on sites where a few minutes saved turned into an hour of fixing a tipped outrigger or worse.

Welp, guess I'll be smelling like rubbing alcohol for a few days.

Funny how the rarest variant always ends up sitting behind the counter" - I see it differently. In my experience those behind-the-counter stacks are usually returns or holds that nobody picked up, not some secret stash they're saving. Had a shop owner once tell me they keep those there because customers handed them back for being damaged or they were preorders that got cancelled. They want to sell them just as much as the wall copies, trust me. That Skottie Young variant you found was probably someone's abandoned pull list item that happened to work out for you.