Who said the cards are placed back into the machine in a random manner? They go back into the machine in exactly the reverse-order they hit the discard (I've never seen a croup shuffle the discards); the card on the top of the discard is the first to be re-introduced into one of the slots holding less than ten cards on the ferris wheel (as cards are drawn from the bottom of the face-up selection dropped into the entry tray). The question is how that slot is selected. Then there's the issue of how a fully occupied slot is selected to dump it's ten cards onto the exit ramp. Both of these are driven by an algorithm in the firmware, which of course can be upgraded at anytime. As I think it's pretty certain that any batch of cards returned will be broken up across all of the slots in the wheel, subject to each slots' occupancy of course, tracking slugs of high cards will be problematic to say the least. The rest of the points you make are fairly obvious.
Personally I think there are just too many variables in how the whole thing works, and that the method used to reorder the cards in the gadget after they've been reintroduced is sufficient to make tracking them a waste of time. I did read a report once of a place that allowed their dealers to let two to three decks accumulate in the discard before reintroducing them - something that will inevitably provide a player advantage at some point, although I doubt you'll find that at too many places. The most I've ever seen is two rounds (40-45/312 on a full table?) waiting to go back in - clearing the discard every other round seems fairly common.
It is possible to apply an individual count to each successive round played, and add the results together for however many rounds you believe latency exists, and this may be the approach by which the seller of the Dyson on EBay has come up with his 0.4% advantage. There's no secret around this, and in actual fact I've discussed this approach with a fair few people over the last ten years. You'd better have deep pockets if you want to give it a run out though.
Good luck if you elect to pursue this particular endeavour. You'll need it . . . .
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