Perfect Preservation

There’s a question I ask whenever I meet a Muslim who claims that the Qur’an has been perfectly preserved by Allah…

If the Qur’an was always perfectly preserved, then why were perfectly preserved Qur’ans burned?

If the Qur’an had been perfectly memorized, why does the hadith describe its compilation as it does? If the Qur’an was already committed to memory then the production of a manuscript would have been the easiest thing in the world – just assemble a few who had memorized it, put them in separate houses with a scribe for a few days. Then just confirm that the texts are identical and the job is done! But this isn’t what we see in the hadith… we see the hunting for scraps, collections with a different number of chapters, memories of missing chapters, …