Originally Posted by CloudCoder

Priority-tagged bags get special handling. Elite passengers get early boarding, and so do their bags. They are carefully and individually loaded into the aircraft FIRST, as a perk of status.

The only drawback is that if the elite bags are loaded FIRST, then they come out of the airplane dead LAST. But the bags did get Early Boarding, and that's important.

Okay, the above is pure speculation. But it surely explains a lot of what we have all observed.