That's true for an ideal "rigid" stick/body, which is just a body for which shocks transfer instantaneously. Reality is that no body is perfectly rigid, obviously, and the shocks propagate depends on th density of the object. Hit a long stick on one side and feel the hit with a delay.

OPs question becomes even more interesting if you start making assumptions about the stick being super light, so really low density, so a normal human could potentially move it. Haven't figured out the answer, a convincing one, though.

Not really, it was pretty much across the board. Every test was more expensive than the first lab. And this was all standard tests, nothing special.