Originally Posted by lawkd
This is fascinating, I hadn't thought of it that way. The hollow, skewered axle is going to have compression along its full length, whereas the solid, bolt-on axle is really only compressed on the ends, in that small distance occupied by the fork dropout.
Exactly. That's why I jumped on the "hollow axles flex" to begin with. Axles aren't subject to flex, at least not from the difference between bolts and QR's - those subject the axles to tension and compression, respectively. (Of course, axles do flex under vertical forces - freewheel rear wheels often got bent on the drive side from such flex, and front MTB hubs had to be redesigned to deal with the extra flex from suspension forks where the legs didn't telescope perfectly together.)
That said, I'd never thought about what happened to the axles (or perhaps just the bolts on the axles moving to one side or another on their threads) as being different between QR and bolt-on wheels.
And in clear answer to the original poster's question, non-QR skewers will still work exactly the same as a QR skewer in this respect - longitudinal compression force on the axle will make the bearings tighten.