I was a television engineer for almost 25 years until I got laid off. However, I wasn’t an editor.
LTC and VITC were supposed to always be the same, but since VITC was part of the video on older analog machines, if you did a video insert edit and were not regenerating time code, you could end up with VITC not matching LTC. Most later machines made sure to regenerate VITC so that wouldn’t happen.
On the lower end machines, LTC took up one of the audio tracks, so it was usual practice to just use VITC. On the higher end broadcast units, LTC had it’s own third audio track.
All is now moot in the age of digital recorders and video servers.
I vaguely remember a lot of what you just posted.
My old boss from TV would have given me grief for the amnesia.
I have a betacamSP from Ebay I bought for very little for nostalgia.