> So, note for me: If I want NTP redundancy and I'm using NIST's servers, pick one NTP server from each of NTP's three sites.

System robustness hazard that won't tolerate just querying time.nist.gov at 4-sec or greater intervals?

From the cow's mouth[1]:

>> The global address time.nist.gov is resolved to all of the server addresses below in a round-robin sequence to equalize the load across all of the servers.

[1] https://tf.nist.gov/tf-cgi/servers.cgi