There could be the possibility that a 10 matching h160 is right next to another one, but of all the data I have sifted through, it never has happened. It's easy to run a decent sized range, say 2^48, where on average, you would find, 256 10 leading h160 matches, but none of them will be right beside each other. Or you can sift through Bram's PoWs and you will find, none of them are right beside each other either.
Did it ever happen that the very next key, the one at which you jumped at, wherever that was, matched?
The chances of THAT happening, is equal to the chance of having the adjacent key matching.
Same question: if you have a minimum interval found in the PoW of Bram's, and use that as a gap fill: do you find, on average, at least one match in the first "minimum interval size" keys starting from where you jumped? Aren't the chances the same, except you changed the point of reference?...
Or do you believe that this changes anything in regard of finding more matches, outside the gaps? Or doing less work in total? Or is it more work?
I guess at Puzzle 117, the discussion will be "but there are no 2 consecutive keys matching 11 characters". Because there's likely to be two that have a common 10-char prefix. And so on.
No one is counting the gazillion consecutive keys that have common shorter prefixes. Why? Because the average length of a common prefix between two hashes is 0.5 bits. Check it out on any range you'd like. And that would break their perception.