For Jeff Neville primarily I guess...
I have no doubt that it would (sorry I know we don't like "would" but I lost my thesaurus) have been at least possible, given enough time, for the factory repair shop to bring the Electra back to virtually "perfect" in terms of strength, dimensions, rivet placement and any other measurable aspect, ie in all practical aspects indistinguishable from a virgin airframe.
Time and resources permitting. The trouble I have with any assumption of that is the obvious where Earhart and Putnam were concerned about most anything with this flight (and as evidenced by the compressed schedule and reports of Earhart's kind attentions to the front office to push repairs ASAP) - people start finding ways to accommodate that are short of the ideal of a perfectly restored machine. That does not mean 'slipshod' - merely that some stuff gets straightened instead of replaced, and oversized rivets are used prolifically instead of removing extensive components to start with fresh pilot holes, etc.
As to stiffener migration (the spacing we see is on average something approaching 3/4" greater than original, except, oddly (and perhaps tellingly), for the first row - which is 'just about right') there could be many reasons, any of which could have remained unrecorded in a way that we've been able to find to-date. For one, while an L10E is supposed to be the same as an L10A except for engines, and some other mods, I don't know that subtle alterations weren't made to areas like this to better distribute skin stresses in tension and bending with such a high fuel load / gross weight capability. I also don't know that some mode of failure wasn't observed that suggested such a necessity - and that a relatively minor alteration scheme wasn't effected during the repair to meet such a newly-realized need.
Not saying 'did happen', saying 'don't know didn't happen' as an example of some things that
do happen in the real world. Mechanics who might have worked the project later hearing these things proffered may feel a bit defensive, and of course they were loyal in their craft and would defend their work as having 'met spec'. No one says it did not - merely that like all such efforts that work was subject to some allowable license for deviations. What is apparent in 2-2-V-1 easily fits within that real-world scheme: ideally it would perfectly match a museum L10; the deviations we see fall within what I've described.
This may make our our review of other types a bit more challenging as they too could have undergone similar efforts - but it's a chance we have to take. Also, we may tend to find that other types have less-mobile features like the stiffeners in the L10 belly, which if I understand correctly dead-end at each bulkhead and don't 'carry through', so can be shifted as to butt line locations, unlike the keel and major longerons which do traverse the bulkheads intact.
If I understand correctly the theory about the rivet pattern not exactly matching what is expected is that stringers/keel/other structure were tweaked a bit in the ground loop and perhaps not restored to perfect placement.
Maybe - but my suspicion is that what we see may have been more deliberate - perhaps as a means to better distribute stresses realized in the outcome of the accident. Or, there could have been some as-yet not detailed alteration in that area of Earhart's airplane.
Many things are possible as to why we see these variations - most of them having to do simply with the nature of such repairs under the working circumstances we know of.
So I'm trying to get a feel for what sort of magnitude of extra effort would have been required to get the underlying structure mentioned above back to "perfect" and if its reasonable that Lockheed didn't go that route. Are we talking a few hours, an extra couple of days, or weeks, assuming no extra repair crew or shift added?
I'm also raising a Spockian eybrow about the alclad stamp not being buffed off of 2-2-v-1...this was still a current production aircraft at the time of repair, as I understand it, and in the control of probably the highest profile customer Lockheed or any other manufacturer was likely to see and they don't take a few minutes to buff the repair patches to match surrounding? What up with that? No doubt they would have been hoping to sell an Electra or two on the backs of our hapless duo so don't you make sure the demo model is tarted up to the max?
There was some discussion of why alclad marking is visible in another recent thread but no real answer that I saw. When one is buffing something one uses lighting and varying view angles to ensure a quality finish leaving no trace of whatever one was trying get rid of