Every engineer that designs an oil filter is thinking about dP of the base plate, media, center tube and bypass valve. ISO 4548 even has sections that the dP of each filter element to be measured. There is zero evidence that "lack of oil distribution" is a problem with any base plate hole design. The main reason is to fool people in to believing the filter "flows more" by seeing more and larger base plate holes, and to gain a hair less dP across the base plate. As already shown in this thread (post 45), even a Fram with visually small holes only has around 1.5 PSI of dP at 10 GPM with 15 cSt oil viscosity. If it had more and larger holes, the dP might go down to 1.0 PSI at 10 GPM.