I might try your approach sometime, as I'm a center of the grill guy right now.
To be honest, my burn patterns seem to be kinda all over the place - sometimes left, sometimes right, sometimes just radially out from the middle in all directions. Hence, my pronouncement about it being fairly random, unless you introduce a driving force that alters the flow distribution, like the Guru or putting the heavy stone deflector right on top of the basket handles.