OK, here's my take on magnetic striping at this point.

 

I acknowledge that the striping isn't purely lateral — it seems that sometimes, new lava flowed overtop of old lava, with a polarity reversal in-between, such that there are vertical stripes as well as horizontal stripes.

 

But that doesn't change the fact that when the lava cooled, it took on the polarity of the Earth's field, and that the field flipped.

 

And despite the fine-grain complexities, the striping from all of the mid-ocean ridges lines up, at least in rough terms, and this correlates to polarization that has been detected in sedimentation elsewhere, sometimes above sea level (in ancient river beds and inland seas that have dried up). The dates cross-check with fossils.

 

IMO, all of this is very sketchy. For example, radio-carbon dating could be wrong by several orders of magnitude. But I still don't think that it leaves the door open wide enough for everything to have occurred within 26 hours, precluding overall polarity reversals. So at least for the time being, I still have to account for differential rotation and torsional oscillation of CFDLs in my model. ;/