Having just finished my final tour on the MD-80, I would also just point out that almost anything is possible in terms of indications not quite working as advertised. One approach to investigating this would be to do a thorough review of the publicly-available FAA Service Difficulty Reports (SDRs), which may provide some history to the failure modes that might lead to such a case. Unfortunately, things like a wheel-not-turning indication cannot be tested for latent failures on the first flight of the day. Just a thought.