My understanding was that the "perfect" landing was first, using the old version of the chip. Then the new chip changed the physics calculations and the demo replay became a crash landing.
So the "crash landing" cartridges are the newer revisions and I'd guess the motivation to change the ship was a simple "update this dependency to the newest version".
It's a bit different than that. The newer version here is physical. So they would stop making the older version at some point. Not like software that the old version is always available. They likely realised it was happening, but just didn't think fixing it was worth it.
Good point. I wonder if the devs of the game even consciously decided the change at all or if the DSP1 supplier at one point simply started shipping the version with the fix.
Which, ironically, would be an early example of forced automatic updates messing things up.
My understanding was that the "perfect" landing was first, using the old version of the chip. Then the new chip changed the physics calculations and the demo replay became a crash landing.
So the "crash landing" cartridges are the newer revisions and I'd guess the motivation to change the ship was a simple "update this dependency to the newest version".