I'm not digging my heels in, but in general, people don't tend to change their view unless they're presented with convincing evidence to the contrary. You haven't provided any, as I've previously stated.
And I'm not "strawmanning" your argument, I'm simply reaffirming the premise of mine - which you obviously take exception to.
You also continually repeat yourself with regard to mechanical stress, but you always seem to ignore the other parts of the equation (the tolerance of mechanical stress that higher mileage athletes have built), and additional factors that add to fatigue (running close to or above LT1 and the resultant byproducts).
And let's take a look at the example you give. Firstly, 45 secs/km is not a slight increase in pace. Going from 6:30/km to 5:45/km is a 13% increase in pace. That's hardly "slight".
Secondly, I coach an athlete (who runs roughly 75kms/wk) whose PB is 42 mins for 10k, and she does a lot of 5-8 minute LT1 intervals (on a flat road) at around 5:10/km. If we factor in the additional 12 secs/km for the 44 minute runner, the increased fatigue and dehydration that comes with a continuous run, the likely uneven surfaces, hills, and we also consider that this runner is performing this run the day after a hard workout (while still fatigued), then it is very, very likely that this 44 minute runner will be exceeding LT1 towards the back half of that 5:45/km run. The elite athletes (including all of the females) are getting nowhere near LT1 (likely not within 40 secs/km) on any of their runs.
Also, quite a few posters on this thread don't seem to know what the term "outlier" means. These athletes are not outliers. There are performers close to them and the next person all the way down the performance continuum. They may be at the far end of the performance spectrum, but that doesn't make them outliers. An outlier would be someone who performs at a level far above the next performer. An example would be Paula Radcliffe's 2:15 marathon performance in 2003, which was 3 minutes faster than the next performer.
I know why you use the term outlier though, it's to support this idea that somehow these people are almost a difference species. They are not. They are made of the same stuff as you and I; and the things that mostly work for them in training, will mostly work for anyone else. In fact, that's the thing with professional athletes - they are far more incentivised to discard things in training that are wasteful, ineffective and/or offer far greater stress than what they are worth.
And lastly, just to cover my bases with other posters, if I chose to collect a study of amateur athletes (to make it somehow "more relatable"), then the sample would've been completely insignificant, no one would know who they were, and no one would care. The line of criticism would've likely been "Why should anyone follow the lead of amateur runners, who've not demonstrated that their training is particularly effective and/or capable of taking them to the highest possible level?"
You may argue that elite runners have reached the highest level due to talent, but when there's lots of talent, the thing that separates the talented is training. You can't be one of the best runners in the world without extremely effective training.
Anyway, this is the last comment I'll leave on this thread. I'm trying to work on other things, and this is quite a distraction.
Good luck with your training.