Sanibel, with all respect, I doubt you or anyone else has the ability to make the assessment that "identical" storms in "identical" synoptics behaved differently.
But you do get my point.
TD-10 last year did something unusual. It burst a good round convection burst out in the Atlantic. My comment was that such bursts in that situation most often became systems. TD- 10 fought weakness and dissipated as its weak surface feature pulled out from its weak convection N of the Antilles. But it left that convection mass behind where it was picked up by a weak Atlantic wave coming in from the east. You know what happened afterwards.
But, really, if a disturbance has the same pressure and fairly similar shape and characteristics it isn't wrong to suggest one has better heart than the other. I could really show you this if we could run loops of such systems in a classroom setting. Some even survive worse shear and negative conditions and develop.