>>  An oldtimer told me that there was once the fashion of turning the brood nest upside down to stop swarm cells developing...

Doing so also was/is another way of reversing without having to lift boxes.  Double broods can be just tumbled forward onto new floors.  It works, but there are problems, and the advantages are not that great.  If done twice, so that the hives are right-side-up again before supering, I can see some labour saved.  I tumble doubles or even triples upside down to drizzle oxalic if the boxes are stuck tight, but set them right back up again.  It is easy to do if planned properly.  The frames do not fall out since, as I said, they are gummed up, but a well-scraped hive could very well fall apart and the frames could flop together crushing bees unless the job is done very deftly.

When we made comb honey, we routinely inverted Ross Rounds supers to get the bottom cells capped when the bees were slow capping, since at some times of year they would fill and cap the top of a section and not complete the bottom.  That worked fine, but it is quite obvious that the frames fall out if a person is not paying attention when removing such boxes.

Back to the rotating hive: IMO is just another in a long series of convoluted Rube Golderg ideas that bored beekeepers come up when looking for new ways to torture their bees. (But what do I know?)

Seems to me that considering all the expense, time and labour spent on such notions, that a beekeeper could simply deploy those resources to run a few more hives instead and be far ahead.

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