I'm less of a genius than you may think. I saw the construction illustrated below, in a Serenellini accordion, and that's where I got the idea that some type of cover of the reeds in cassotto might have a practical purpose. Only, this Serenellini cover was on the wrong side to do what I needed. So a bit of lateral thinking got me going. I suspect that the Serenellini cover has to do with avoiding any influence from the changing distance to the bass blocks as the bellows are opened and closed.
On a different note (not musical) I just had to laugh at the statement "yes at 20 to 50 megabytes for their entire loaded program it is certainly trim" about software... I had to think back at the time when I wrote a control program for model railroads, in which you could enter the layout of the tracks (sections, switches, crossings...), the route you wanted each of up to 30 trains to follow, and then the program would control everything in real time. I had exactly 2Kbyte (not Mbyte, Kbyte) for the whole programm, and 1Kbyte ram as working memory (plus a little bit of stack space)... We have come a very long way (since 1985)...