My jaws are all perfectly straight, and perfectly out of parallel with the lathe axis! The jaws grip at the forward end but not farther back, so you can rock workpiece from side to side and watch it pivoting on the opposing jaws leading "tooth". When you look all the way to the back of the jaw, it's got a lot of clearance. Same for all four jaws or in other words any opposing pair. And yes it did give me fits before I figured it out. Swapping jaws around didn't make any difference. I did a little very light removal from the front tooth of each jaw with a sanding drum, and got a little improvement, but I'm afraid to do too much without having some sort of control. It seems the jaws are all very uniformly tipped in towards the center a little bit.
edit: forgot to add that I checked with a parallel, so I know that it's not a case of the chucked piece having a taper.