[rdancer]

I have seen ever-lower TTLs in the wild, sub-minute even, in the past few years. Even historically, TTLs have in my experience always been respected.

I think what really tends to happen, and this gets the folks confused, is that the initial TTL is high (say, 3 days), then the sysadmin wants to do some changes, and because they want to be able to keep changing the IP quickly, while they're working on it, they set the TTL low (say, 1 minute). Only you cannot retroactively lower the TTL of the records that have been sent previously, they'll expire whenever during the following 3 days.

Your point still stands, mostly. The probability of the old record with a high TTL to be evicted from a resolver's cache during any given short period of time is low.