You can imagine all you want, fact of the matter is their code can be improved - the devs don't need you coming to their defense with conjecture. I didn't provide the m3u8 because 1) it's trivial to find, and 2) it's not just the NY feed; check Boston, Dallas-Fort Worth, Sacramento, Baltimore….
What's happening is when the feed is initially called it loads a lower resolution, then jumps to the higher resolution. You can confirm this by throwing the m3u8 link you posted into VLC. Unfortunately, the TVE feed resolution doesn't jump up.
All I was asking was if it's not possible to update the TVE feeds on their end, would it be possible for me to override feeds on my end. The best solution I've found, which is more of a Band-Aid, is to set my custom channel to the same channel number as the TVE and to set the custom channel as higher priority source than the TVE (see source code below).
#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:-1 channel-id="CBSN" channel-number="6970" tvg-logo="https://assets.fancybits.co/channels/247channels/cbsn-logo.png" tvg-name="CBSN" tvc-guide-title="CBSN: CBS News New York" tvc-guide-description="CBSN: CBS News New York" tvc-guide-art="https://assets.fancybits.co/channels/247channels/cbsn-logo.png",CBSN
https://dai.google.com/linear/hls/event/jeTDC610T-OSPdiWhcl0Pg/master.m3u8
@psperry Editing to add that you can download the guide data by choosing Manage Lineup on your custom channel, choosing the + sign next to the individual channel, then searching for the channel for which you want pull guide data.