Just a quick little poll here. I lost almost 1.6b by recycling my units with bonuses on them. At the time 5.0 came out I recycled one unit, killed the game, loaded it back up and my stats were the same so I thought it was safe to do the rest that were displayed as not being in my army. Boy was I wrong to trust Gree.
I did some testing last night and on iOS, using the latest version of MW. I deleted a unit, killed the game and went back into my character profile to see how long it took for my stats to update. Using a stopwatch I found that it took 9 minutes and 38 seconds for my profile stats to update.
I'm going to argue that it's morally wrong for Gree to continue allowing this feature to be in game, without a great big warning that tells people that bonus units are still counting as being in your army, even if they don't display so. People have spent money on this game and have lost those units due to Gree saying "we did rigorous testings before releasing this version" and trusting them. This is a poorly designed feature and some common sense should have been used when creating it.