It's been replaced by in-game function: In the car/mod selection screen there is a button marked "viewer" on the left - click that and you get the same function as the standalone program, but for all cars and mods.
I don't know about DD wheels specifically, but I know WD40 can really mess with some electronics. In the radio-control circles I was in (way, way back), it was always referred to as "servo killer" rather than by name, even by the model shops selling it. (It didn't kill them dead, but it made them twitchy and nothing would fix it).
I've tested and confirm that MCI packets stop during the skip forward from a click. I skipped a 30 minute race of 20 cars in one go with no loss of connection (Rony's RandomCar).
I haven't tried RIP yet, but I will.
I did manage to get a disconnection from a 30-car replay of the "Just A Ride" server, but it takes a jump of about an hour. Just from a quick look it seems that UCO and CSC packets can also be fast enough - they have a lot of checkpoints and circles there.
It's easily manageable now though, without the MCIs.
12 seconds should be enough, and a text option to increase it would be great.
I was looking for some examples of the short timing for you but so far I've only found a few and they are indeed all 8 seconds when timed properly. (A lot of times they're on grass - they get the car reset and give it the gas, but they're spinning wheels and still not moving when they get specced a couple of seconds later).
(I wonder if maybe your cutoff speed for speccing people is different to mine for allowing JRR - that could eat into the 8 seconds and make it seem shorter when it isn't. I did increase mine to 5mph recently to see if it would help, but I haven't done any checking other than people's complaints about it happening seem to have gone down a little)
Edit: something with 'dnf' in it for the wording I think would be clearest, /specdnf maybe.