Martin, this battle has been fought, won, and the engineers seem to not be satisfied with the victory so they moved away from a good old idea.

I was still in HS at the time that dad bought a brand new pair of JD LLA box drills. The very first complaint he had of them, was the corrugated rubber seed tubes. He observed that the stand was not as even as the old JD drills we had always used, due to the seed bunching in the corrugations. The rubber was also susceptible to deterioration from sunlight, and he worried about that, so removed all the tubes one year and stored them in his shed. Then the neighbors relayed reports of mice getting in the the boxes and munching holes in the tubes. Combined with the fact that the clips that held the tubes to the disk openers didn't hold very securely after having been taken off and replaced and thus tended to come loose and dangle, scattering seed on top the ground until you caught it; made the removal for storage operation a short lived practice on the farm.

The old spring steel spiral wound seed tubes were a lot better IMHO. Very slick on the insides and the later versions that were galvanized, seemed to stay good forever. Still have some on a couple old drills sitting in the fencerows. They would get hung up on something , occasionally and stretch way out and drag behind the openers. You could also dent them if they got pinched somewhere in the drill. Wasn't much of a chore to straighten them or even re-roll the spirals on the stretched ones.