My brother and have a -7A. We have about 1400 hours on it. It has at least 1800 landings on it including grass. We have never had an problem with the nose gear. Believe me. If the nose gear had an inherent problem, Van would be on it. As an example, ours is kit number 221. Just as we were completing our rudder, Van announced that he was sending all -7 builders a -9 rudder because the -7 didn’t recover from a spin as quickly as a -6. It still came out within FAA guidelines. Now, RV’s have no tendency to spin. Most builders don’t spin them and Van recommends that you do not spin the side by side airplanes. By the way, we kept our original-8 rudder. Looks better. But he sent out at least 221 -9 rudder kits free of charge. That cost Van a lot of money. You know Van studied the nose gear very carefully after a few people had problems and concluded that there was not an inherent flaw. He did issue a service bulletin that cut about two inches off of the threaded end and required a new yoke design. The owner bore the cost. The changed raised the nose gear mounting nut about two inches higher.
If you look very carefully at the nose strut, it is not tapered. It is 1.02” at the nose wheel yoke. About midway up, it is.094”. At engine mount it is 1.12”. The strut is designed to flex at the thinnest point. Van is a brilliant engineer. He didn’t just pull the nose gear design out of thin air. The problem with the Anti-Splat is it removes the flex point that Van designed in and transferred the stress to top of the strut where it is attached to the engine mount where Van did not intend the gear to flex.