Well, that really depends how you look at it. What you are doing is selecting a seat that you will occupy on the day you fly. The fact that you request that seat early on is, in your view, the defining time, in my view, only accessory and not really relevant. Just as all the other examples that I gave, it gives you a right that you will exercise on the flight day.

As for others' experiences, as jerry a. laksa rightly says, we have heard both lucky and unlucky reports over the years, so some people will continue being lucky and others unlucky (and any change of seat or configuration will pretty much guarantee the unlucky outcome) but the rule itself is pretty straightforward and therefore the existence of some lucky escapes does not create the sort of precedent that one could use to request the same.