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[patentatt]

Anyone have a sense of how frequent new grounds of rejection under 41.50(b) (where the examiner is completely bypassed - and the rejection is evaluated regardless of whether the examiner agrees with it) is relative to recommendations-for-rejections-to-examiners under 41.50(a) and/or requests-for-appellants-to-brief-an-issue under 41.50(d)?

Because BPAI decisions would only mention (b), you never see how frequent (a) and (d) if you only look at BPAI decisions.  To see the frequency of (a) and (d), you would have to you dig through file wrappers.  Looking at BPAI decisions, (b) seems to happen in less than 5% of cases.

[patentatt]

The new final rules (published today) state that the BPAI hardly ever used (d) and so it is removed.

The rules package also states that 1% of reply brief result in allowance and 1% result in reopening prosecution (2% success).  On top of the rates at Pre-Appeal and Appeal Brief and BPAI, these are just more chances to win.