My only trouble with "all the water at once with the food" methodology is the fact that it's an overload of everything at once.

Say the dog eats X amount of food, then the dog's digestive juices go to work trying to break down and process that food.

Left alone, the dog's digestive juices are already challenged when in optimal concentration to try to do so

However, with the influx of an assload of water on top of that, all at once, those stomach juices become diluted

Giving the dog all the food at once, by itself, is a challenge for the dog to digest completely and properly, but there is no way this can happen with the total dilution of these digestive acids with a day's worth of water on top of it.

No way.

Jack