No doubt on sealing everything - I'm with you on that. In fact the new style base has two holes in the bottom that seem to be for the Infusion internal diamond adjusters - those will need to be sealed as well.

It's just that the inside of the base has four contact areas with the mast interior. These are the point the rivets go in. In the front, and on the sides, the interior section of the base is flat. Filling all that area with goop would require a lot of goop and seems like it might be overkill (it would certainly make things hard to get apart). That having been said, I'm trying to find out if that's the practice. The piece I took out was not filled in completely in those areas, but again I don't it was the original (and maybe not correct) job.