This is pretty annoying but at least it reminds you that all variables are case-insensitive. I would rather see all variable names converted to lowercase than to preserve the case in some situations and convert them to lowercase in others.

It's useful if the value of b is actually the result of a function call that has side-effects. In this situation you may want the function to be evaluated even if the resulting expression is false (because the value of a is false). I do agree that the alternative syntax is not intuitive though.

I am running into this too and it's quite frustrating. The mission I'm using can be found on GitHub at https://github.com/CtrlC-Root/arma3-missions/tree/master/CtrlC-EXT-Research.Altis. It works great using the "Singleplayer" and "Multiplayer" modes in the editor but when I load it using the built-in multiplayer server to play with a friend I'm always missing a few objects at random. I basically can't play any of the missions I make because of this.

Wow, how is this not fixed yet? This completely prevents the Support Modules from working in the game with this helicopter. I spent maybe 30 minutes unpacking PBOs and reading through scripts trying to debug this figuring it was probably a new bug that had been introduced by the recent 1.54 update. But instead I find out it was reported more than half a year ago. How hard can this be to fix?

EDIT: I can confirm this is still a problem in the current 1.54.