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How are you confirming that it is sandboxed?

I have actually had hands on experience with this.  You will likely read almost everywhere that the shorter, the better but it wasn't the case for one of our clients.  We had a client who was ranking pretty high for a very competitive word.  We began going through an on-site SEO audit and clean up issues such a tags, meta, alt, etc.  We also decided to shorten all of the URL's to http://example.com/page and set up 301's to point to the new url.  It immediately lost all rankings even after a very lengthy wait of a de/re index.  Their rankings came back  quickly after we moved it back to long tail.

I doubt this will be the case for all scenarios, but it was better to keep the category in this case in the URL.

Lately, I have been using www.woorank.com to run the initial analysis for the quote and then I use raventools for the ongoing reporting to the client.