Perhaps an example might help. If your process is to assemble two rods into a go/no go gauge, ie you are concerned about the total length of the two rods when assembled end to end, then the RSS method calculates the tolerance stack that will succeed X% of the time, where X is governed by the means and standard deviations of the two rod's lengths. The advantage of this is that on balance you will be able to live with looser tolerances than a strict addition of the tolerances would suggest (the pay-off being that X% of the time the assembly will fail).
I think (fairly confidently) that Viktor is hinting that things are rarely that simple, and that a proper study of the tolerances will not result in such a simple rule. Many dimensions are linked, eg if you have 3 pins on a part and the part shrinks then you have 3 dimensions that move in the same direction, together. As soon as they are related, then the statistical argument collapses completely, and you would be better off doing a monte carlo type simulation, or something.
I don't think that NASA paper says much more than sometimes they do it one way, some times another, and they often adjust things. Cheers
Greg Locock