Lucius: No, can't find the may who helped us back in 2014 to set up the wallet and told us to keep those 16 words. It was a 'one day event' that you book through meeting website for events with people of similar interest. This one was for novice people willing to have help to get a wallet with Multibit.
I can however, remember very well that he said that those 16 words were to be kept in case we had to recover the wallet and those words in we loose it, we was like loosing our bitcoin and we needed them to recover the bitcoin if needed.
I'll answer your last post first, and I can confirm that your link really shows the MultiBit Classic version of the wallet, and this is what the MultiBit HD version looks like :

However, if we know that the Classic version did not have the ability to create a seed, and that the HD version had a seed of 12/18 words, I wonder how it is possible that you have a seed consisting of 16 words

a simple 12-word passphrase written down protects all your bitcoins forever