And then there's the fact that all of the hex values (as strings, minus the leading zeros) all appear to be grouped into groups of 4 by character length...? (e.g. the first 4 hexes are all 1 character long, the next 4 are all 2 characters long, etc...)
This is a hex key, 0x1000000 , tell me how can you add or drop one 0 from it? By dividing it by 16 or multiplying it by 16, so if you want to increase the bit range/ difficulty, you'd have to do it every 4 keys, 4*4 = 16. This way you can make sure every key is in the right bit range.
The whole point of this multi million dollar puzzle is to have zero pattern, being completely random. As he stated that he didn't think of it as a puzzle, people did.