D18280 solved the underlying problem.

Fair enough; I'll stop bothering you now. D18280 looks good to me.

In T12933#230136, @chad wrote:

I see no way of reconstructing the rows.

I may be mistaken, but it seems to me that D18280 will fix the problem only for new edits, made after that revision is applied. Is that right?

In T12933#230063, @epriestley wrote:

The creation date and modification date of a body should always be the same, like they are for a Phriction document body.

In case it helps: I think D13982 introduced the code being edited by D18253. But it sounds like some other code isn't behaving the way you were expecting it would.