The pattern doesn't go on for terribly long (you can see a break in the pattern towards the left of the photo, where there is actually a set of 3 aligned rows instead of 4).

They could have accomplished the same thing in a more uniform way by placing the tiles in the standard half-interval or quarter-interval pattern across all of them. The only thing that makes any sense to me is that it's quicker/ faster to align the tiles than it is to offset them, but they couldn't have them aligned the whole way for the reasons you outlined.