If you start off by recognising that most Briggs engines never have their oil changed anyway, and most of them never have it checked or topped up, it gets a bit easier to see where they are going. Let's say they will last three years or so even if they made no changes at all from existing engines. Then what if they throw half a cupful of molybdenum disulphide into the sump at the factory?
I bought an old junk Honda engine once that had nothing but molybdenum disulphide in the sump, apparently put in after it became badly worn and impossible to keep oil in. The stuff was still there and still keeping it from seizing, when I got it. Of course it was so badly worn that I had to throw the whole base engine away, but boy, was it worn. I had another Honda that still had oil in the sump when it was worn nearly as much, but that one oiled a clean plug and stopped running in about 1 minute from a cold start, and meanwhile it smogged out the whole street. The molybdenum disulphide was a much better, and much cheaper, solution. (Not as good as putting new rings in the engine when it started to smoke of course, but if you can't do that yourself, it is unaffordably expensive.)
