"One place we worked with had to carefully de-tune a new tape drive after learning that the old one had drifted out of alignment for at least a year before physically failing, "
This sounds like a story two decades old, LTO and all modern tape drives have servo tracks on the tapes.. AKA the drive realigns itself to the tape track on the fly as the media passes the head. If the drive cannot do this, you get track following check conditions during the write.
That's certainly possible – I thought that was their first generation LTO system but it might have been the previous one which was being replaced. It was a decade ago so both would still have been in service at that time.
The main point in mentioning it wasn't to say that tape is terrible but just that each unique class of hardware brings unique challenges which might not be obvious at first until you have a fair amount of operational time. (Thinking about the people who learned the hard way why RAID arrays should mix hard drives across batches and manufacturers)
This sounds like a story two decades old, LTO and all modern tape drives have servo tracks on the tapes.. AKA the drive realigns itself to the tape track on the fly as the media passes the head. If the drive cannot do this, you get track following check conditions during the write.