He said he skates 3 sessions a day, the first two are devoted to programs, and then he works on the quads and other elements on their own during the 3rd session, but at this point he is really tired by the 3rd session because he is not used to training so hard. I don't think he's trying to make excuses, I think he just wants to get his feet under him and his reputation back before he brings back the quad. Nothing wrong with that. Now, if come Europeans and Worlds he' still not attempting the quad, then we can speculate. Until then though, let it be.
The other thing is that I understand why people would get annoyed if skaters like Oda or Brezina didn't attempt the quad because the rest of their jumps are just so good. But for Verner, that was not the case last season or historically, he often had 3a problems and problems with his regular triples. He really should be focusing on getting the 3a consistent before he focuses on the quad and that appears to be what he's doing now, and it's working. Also, a lot of the top men weren't attempting quads all last season - Lysacek, Oda, Weir, Chan, Brezina and then you had Takahashi and Abbott who did attempt the quad but fell on it the majority of the time. After seeing Evan will the OGM and Joubert finish down in 16th, I think it was a wake up call for most men about the power (or lack thereof) of the quad.
I doubt Verner would go to worlds and retry a jump in competition that he gave up on in his full programs in the GP season. Worlds has so much pressure. It would have to be Europeans. If it is not there he's probably not going to do it. I am not sure the theory of building up triples then to add the quad later still makes sense to me like it did earlier in the season because obviously he needs to work on programs with quads and triples. He can't do all triple programs and then train the quad separately and then add the quad. Everything needs to work together. This is what Verner himself is saying. The more he trains programs quadless the more difficult the quad will be in my opinion. I wouldn't even care that much if his past didn't have several good to great performances with quads and triples.
The second part about Lysacek and Joubert at the Olympics is true because Verner (and or his coach-Verner is used to encompass the whole Verner team) is just using a total copy of Lysacek's Olympic layout with just tiny modifications. He always gets edge calls on the flip but he didn't take that out to fix it! He just goes out and does edge call flips because he only gets an edge call. What about a Loop for Verner? Quads cause problems out- flip gets edge calls in -no problem.
Obviously this win is seen as a fluke because Chan fell and everyone is talking about Chan and no one really thinks much of this Verner win but he won and that's something.