I'm agreed!

The failure reported doesn't match with a pickup failure. I have had what TPJ mentioned, a randomly fail on ignition being the pickup wire at the plug end broken indide, not inside the dist thoght ( but can happen too ). It got me crazy for some weeks ( my car was a driver by those days ). I had to shake the dist plug until get succes to start up the engine, but never was related to a missed ignition when cranking, and just starting up releasing the key.

We can never say that's imposible, but doesn't sound logical... just an opinion. I think there is something else still floating around.