My major point, which I don't think you disagree with, is that none of this research is telling us anything useful. What we know is that people need to eat a reasonable amount of calories and they need to exercise. That amount is different for different people in different situations, but it's not due to inflammation, or any of the other tiny factors that vary person to person.
If you are eating 2000 calories a day and consistently maintaining weight, and inflammation causes you to store some more of your energy intake as fat at some point, you will also burn that fat off at some point. There's no reason to think that small temporary metabolic shifts within a calorically consistent environment cause long term fat gain.