These questions are best answered with cameras! We reached out to his management at least once - he and Steve share at least some of the same people. Someone in the email chain stopped responding, who knows why. Once we get the new studio set up we’ll reach out again. He’s done many technical conversation interviews over the years so hopefully he’d be interested in ours.
Re: the “doing it the hard way” theory, I don’t buy this at all. What we see in his technique looks like pretty straightforward wrist movement. It’s crosspicking and slower speeds, in the Albert Lee style – good catch @Judmeister and @Sorc. And when he goes faster we can’t really tell because we don’t have the camera angle. The elbow technique - not even worth mentioning. I would not shed a year if it went away forever. The “Rock Discipline” era was the high water mark for effortless accuracy, and that was all wrist.
The way I think of it is this: any lick that’s entirely outside picking can be 1WPS and swiped. I think this is the source of the “outside picking is easy, inside picking is hard” idea that guitarists have (for me it was the opposite: 2WPS came easily to me when I was first learning, but I never figured out swiping).
but for some reason it feels way more natural to lead into the next string with the pick heading in the same direction (down pick for higher string, up pick for lower (thicker!) string) rather than trying to get the pick over the string and then switching direction to actually pick it.