Jothan,
... prominent pre-registration sites for 201X new TLDs, United Domains and Pool ...
There's a joke there somewhere, something about something that does not yet exist being offered as already expired.
... neither are collecting money ...
Neither did NetSol prior to a specific point in time, but it did acquire market share which at a later point in time it was successful in converting to a fee for service.
... setting any expectations about their service ...
The mere offer creates a duty to meet an expectation, whether it is the "reasonable person" standard or the "informed domainer" standard, or something else, is TBD.
... to a person actually obtaining the domain name ...
Again, the expectation depends on what the standard is, and while the ad copy may have me laughing that UD has a way to get the .usa inventory past the DoC, it may look pretty good to the targets of other deceptive advertizing.
These objective criteria ...
My point above being that these are not objective criteria, this is what attornies for the FTC do for a day job, is test marketing propositions for liability under existing law. Further, they are of no use to the issue of trying to ask what the RAA (any version) has to say about the conduct by a registrar, or a reseller, and cannot replace ICANN's own statement on the issue. Your next point is a real stretch:
It seems like the pre-registrations are largely demonstrative as reasonably good empirical evidence for ...
As the numbers are significantly less than the 100k number that was posited at what became the kick-off of the Vertical Integration Saga, and most I knew assumed that 100k was a safe upper bound for the size of the defensive+generic buy, which is why the RACK+ and IPC positions on exceptions (to Recommendation 19, the requirement for registrars) was in the few thousands, to eliminate registries-as-gamed-marks+generics, I read those numbers as failing to predict the sunrise/landrush buys of the "top ten" ranked propositions. Not "proof" that a benefit (as yet unidentified) is greater than a (well known) cost.
Those are two examples that are operating in the realm of reasonable practice ...
There is an ICANN Registrar Advisory Concerning Inappropriate Lending of Registry Access from 12 February 2002 that may be relevant to this representation. I agree with your final two paragraphs. Eric