[Christ]

Going on personal experience, I gotta say that it's just as easy to bend tread plate as it is to bend flat aluminum sections.

The exception might be that the diamonds are thicker, so the metal is more likely to bend at the points exactly around them, but the purpose of those diamonds is not to add rigidity. If it does anything, it's a side effect of it's intended purpose.

Nobody said it didn't add rigidity, mcrews just made note that they weren't put there for that purpose.