No. I don't think you are trolling.

And in fact my re-sync'ing to see if the latest MSAN update had been applied was in fact probably pointless, as suggested.

However there can be reasons to re-sync the modem, for instance if it has sync'ed low during a thunderstorm that has well and truly moved many miles away or ceased. But when the question comes out of the blue that and any other other examples - (none of which come to mind now for instance!) it somehow hard to think why you do it.

Sometimes you just have an intractable problem, where doing things on the computer or router don't solve it, but a re-sync does. You normally try all the other things first, unless it's a recurrent one and you know re-sync'ing is the thing to do.

All the caesium clock stuff was intended light-heartedly. Though I found out about that pentaquark yesterday and was fascinated. One theory is it contains 4 quarks and an anti-quark (effectively anti-matter).