Anyone who's able to drop from 224 to 185 is not talking about considering dropping 39 lbs of muscle. Not even 20 lbs. Just no.
When you go down in weight to fight either competitively or non, it's clear to me that that means losing as much fat as possible while retaining as much muscle as possible. Nobody needed to debate that prior to this thread, it was always rightly assumed, and there's no need to consider that it meant anything else, unless stated directly (which would be weird as hell).
I'm not guaranteeing that becoming more lean will make him quicker (as you can see from my first post), but I am guaranteeing that it will make it easier to be quicker.
Assuming he's not going to be using some kind of wasting disease or twisted organ removal surgery, at the end of losing weight in any semi-normal manner there's just less mass to move around, and you don't need hardly any muscle at all to move fast or hit hard. If you're using muscle to strike you're doing it wrong. All the fastest guys are not that muscular or fat, and that's no coincidence. The p4p hardest and fastest hitters are lean guys. No fighter gets slower from getting lean-- this is not even up for debate.
I get the weight class thing in theory, but not in reality. It's 'interesting' but not applicable. Striking is about being practical, so I try to answer in practical terms. It's hard enough to understand responses and instructions that are plain and to the point. I have no idea why anyone would choose to stress and emphasize the unlikeliest of theoretical scenarios when giving advice, but oh well.