God bless you for keeping this alive.
The sibling subthread by fidotron apparently needed to be flagged, even though (or because?) it contains some of the most concrete information of all comments.
But I guess people are supposed to read Valsorda's reply only ...
It doesn't prove anything about the core part of the suspicion, which is they were selected using some undisclosed criteria, which may make them weaker or stronger than some other random numbers.
You are entirely familiar with the precedent of the DES s boxes of course, where that is exactly what happened.