I appreciate your educated opinion, and while that may be true for most types of clamps, the difference here is the gap. With the gap in the front, your bars may rotate if you have to hit the brakes hard and all your weight is pushing on the bars. The bars are less likely to rotate towards the non gap side(where the arrows are) as that side will be torqued tighter than the gap side. Just my opinion and I could be wrong but in over 25 years of riding motorcycles, I have never seen the gap to the front.I just like to give you my machinist background point of you on this one if you don't mind. When you machine those, usually they are bolted together and you machine the 7/8" hole (can be machine or hone for perfect fit). To make sure that the clamp hole is always perfectly round, you need to put the cap back on the assembly in the same position (arrows and L/R). Same thing in an engine. Each cap that goes over the crank or camshaft are numbered and have a direction.
So my point of common sense here would be that if you rotate the post to move your handlebar forward, the cap should move with the assembly. In the stock configuration the caps are pointing forward, and backward if you rotate the post. :canada: