Well dang, I stand corrected. Thanks for pointing that our Perna. However, I did not do any manual tweaking of my model. That example was purely an 8 sided cylinder with its cap deleted and extruded out into a square, and then duplicated in an array, merged, and bent. Like you said, mathematically pure. The difference…
Modeling insets into a curved surface is a classic modeling conundrum. My preferred solution is to model the insets on a flat plane and then use a bend modifier to curve the shape. However if you you do that to a lowpoly and then subdivide it you will still end up with pinching, not as bad as your example, but still pretty…