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I am a little late to the party here. I did get to see some of the process of writing the new manual and the end product probably suffers from having way too many fingers in the pie so everyone can get OR/NCOER bullets.
As far as resting the magazine on the ground; it is definitely the most viable option for 90% of joes. I'm Distinguished Rifleman/Presidents 100 and I do it anytime I have the option to. Anytime you can rest the rifle on something it's going to be easier to shoot. Shooting is 40% trigger control, 40% stable position, and 20% sight picture. Having perfect trigger control or a perfectly stable position allows you to shoot good scores while being bad at one or the other. Sight picture is really you either get it or you don't.
There is more than likely some truth to the old dogma that resting the rifle on the magazine caused malfunctions. It can probably be attributed to the old style feed ramps, bad magazines, and unservicable equipment. I can see how pushing forward on the rifle while resting the magazine would orient rounds so the tips would catch. M4 feed ramps extend further, and continue into the upper receiver. Also the new magazines and pmags are a lot better than the old green follower and black follower mags.
There are some downsides. The rifle does bounce down if you don't put some force on the front. The difference is from putting 100% of the rifle weight on the mag, to 60% or so. But who cares on the Army qual course? You only have one shot per target anyways.
Another thing is that teaching marksmanship is always easiest by building a stable position, and then perfecting trigger control, and sight picture. If you put Joe in a position where it's almost impossible to fuck up: like prone supported with a sandbag under the front and army green sock full of sand under the back, it is almost impossible to fuck up grouping and zeroing. Then it's only a matter of removing the training wheels to learn positional shooting. But 90% of units never get past the grouping and zeroing stages. And chasing a zero all day is not good training for a soldier.
Insofar as barrel harmonics; the only real cardinal rule is to not rest the barrel on anything. And beware of shooting through the sandbag. How you rest the magazine or lower isn't terribly important because the upper more or less floats on top of the lower. Using a sling on a normal M4 is weighting increased stability vs a shifted zero. The amount of shift depends on sling tension, and is at least worth confirming at 25 or 100. It's usually not a lot because Joe isn't going to put 30 pounds of tension on it like a highpower shooter.
There's always pros and cons, but the bottom line is that it's a lot easier to teach Joe ways to be more stable first so he has a foundation to work with and see the effects of good sight picture and trigger control.
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