Those time stamps are there for other reasons that may someday in the future be useful (like contract enforcements, or marking an anniversary, or something) It does not have any affect on the algorithms that govern the block chain.
Are you stating that timestamps aren't used to calculate the difficulty? Are you stating there are no possible manipulations of the difficulty via timestamps that could be exploited? If yes, where I can read the analysis?
Correct.
I went down this path a good while back myself. I even pestered a couple of the devs for a minute to confirm my assessment in the code.
If there is a record of that part, it would be in the IRC log, it was only a few lines. I didn't want to waste much of their time with it as it is only a matter of perception and not a technical problem needing to be fixed.
I wrote a few words about it yesterday.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=789978.msg9039996#msg9039996If anything, that BCX pointed to it as meaningful, is less evidence of an attack, not more.
Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.