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Ryan,
You are correct. I always leave my third row seats stowed. However, I was referring to when you split the middle seat grouping. On my old Tahoe, I can flop down on the the rear passenger seats (or both, and the do fold up against the front driver/passenger seats) and have a longer flat run to stow on. But not in the LR#, unless the seat is fully folded away. Then I contend with the large seat bottom and lose some of that run.
Regardless, there are always trade offs. The step up is only a couple inches. If I'm not carrying a third, or more, passenger, then I can stow all of them and have more space - and store the cargo cover in the gap exposed. On my Tahoe I ended up leaving that at home 99% of the time and never used it.
On my Tahoe I also still had enough space to store flat items or blankets and things in the footwell area or beneath the rear passenger seats. I haven't checked that out on my LR3 yet.
All that aside, I just drove almost 400 miles to Wilmington, DE and enjoyed the drive tremendously, aside from the dump truck that flipped on the NJ TPKE and shut the highway down for 2 hours!