Why does it take so many hours to brea in arc preamps and amps?

perhaps whoever recommends 600 hours break-in to any component except i guess car or boat, definitely doin' some substance abuse...
it might be either mushrooms or lsd.

My .02$, elements within tubes do change with use.   Frequently this is perceived as a diminution of harsh, hard, bright and othee unpleasant qualities. It shouldn't take a billion hours to get rid of this, sometimes only 60 hours, but more is typical oh let me say on average, oh just guessing,  for a typical set up maybe,  output tubes about 120, but please this is obviously highly highly variable.  Don't come back at me telling me this amp takes waaay more time or whatever. If your experience is different I would not be surprised.   
Two things. 1 tubes continue to change to some extent throughout their use, but usually reach a level sound.
2.  AND in ARC gear this can be very important.   You don't hear the tubes in certain circuits.  I had an ARC  pre and I  rolled 12AX7s in it couldn't hear any changes, tried a bunch of 5751s, same effect.
As for caps, That I don't know and of course  the circuitry itself ages. 

the only breakin time I worry about is with new speakers

I do think ARC tells you to warm their components up a bit for best sound, but it won't kill you to listen to an ARC pre-amp that isn't all the way warmed up


at least, it won't kill you right away

"Let’s play with the "burn in" crews heads.

If you think about it, all the optimum adjustments are made at the factory after the amps been on for a while, maybe an hr if your lucky.
If thing change after 600hrs then those optimum factory adjustments have just gone out the window and need to be redone again.

So it’s either out of adjustment because of aging, and therefore not optimum, or the factory needs to have them on for 600hrs before they are adjusted and sent out to the shops.
Either way if things change they would be out of the original optimum adjustment.

Cheers George"

I understand what you're trying to say here, but that's really not how it works. When a designer is building a new product and makes changes, the component gets broken in before they listen to it. For about 20 years now, I've been evaluating prototype's during the design phase for several manufacturers. I break in every piece of equipment they send me. Sometimes I'll see the same component 10-15 times as changes are made. That means I break it in 10-15 times.