Sorry for the double post, Bike Forums had a hiccup and I thought it had deleted my original post.
As for the Lunar Surface, I tried really hard to make it look really bad, but in reality it doesn't look that bad. I had to use fun lighting conditions to really bring out the surface. I'm gonna go ahead and give it a try, though I won't really use it too much because I like my face. Thanks guys for telling me about BB shell failures, it makes sense that I wouldn't suffer "spontaneous death" from a crack in such a location.
As for intergranular corrosion, I fail to see how that would .. ohh ok. At first I was going to say something about how the way that the bb shell was made the grain direction would work in such a way that the chem would have had to work its way in from an exposed edge of the shell, but the paint is intact. I see now that the pitting would allow the chem to work its way in through there.

Oh, and those numbers aren't stamped. I'm actually surprised at how shallow the serial number on there really is.

As for the specific design of cutouts on BB shells, I .... I really don't understand how that can be true. I would like to believe it, but I have seen so many differently shaped cut-outs (Is that hyphenated?) that were huge, and the BB shell has been of constant thickness all around, it just seems like there wasn't as much judicious thought as I had hoped, or maybe I am severely underestimating the strength of what I can see. If you google BB shell cut-out you'll see what I mean. It is true though, that they were all steel. My shell seems to be in perfect condition from the inside, and most of the shell from the outside is pristine, it is just a 1"x2" patch that looks a little lunar.