That looks like an older article by the date. The plane in the picture is basically the WR (as you say) that was pictured on QS-tool's website, which has since disappeared as I guess having a findable source of the planes wasn't what WC was looking for (at least in English).

The QS planes had a bronze cap like that, not surprisingly, and as mentioned in here, the frog design was slightly different than bedrock - it was a copy of the LN frog. When things went south between LN and WC, WC either did so by agreement or was forced to change the frog design to eliminate stuff that looked like or was copied from LN.

Which was the puzzling but possibly telling part from the start - why not copy the bedrock in the first place instead of LN? I think the answer was either laziness or because bedrocks weren't worth as much as LN's at the time (usually by a factor of two to three for a used bedrock - I've had a bunch of them and never paid more than $100 for any).

If that's around the time of V3, it's possible that it may already have the bedrock frog changes, but there were some quality issues with those planes that paul doesn't address (paul's not much of an authority on anything, but he could probably write a pretty credible account about attracting beginning woodworkers), but nothing major that I recall. Paul's early gimmick was advising against spending money on boutique tools (he wants people to send the money to him instead - that's the business gimmick - something for nothing, but hundreds of dollars a pop for beginner's classes, and eventually website only - which is less hassle and probably more profitable.)

I don't think any notable makers care that much about what their chisels or planes are or would think they're worthy of even a verbal discussion.