The consensus I've seen, is it isn't actually motor oil. A slight bit of fuel vapor over time, theory goes, seeps into threads and polymerizes or whatever into a kind of oil. I know exactly what you're referring to, saw it just this morning when a plug is removed notably even on a flathead, it can have that characteristic film. I just wipe it off the plugs no breakdowns yet!
I was thinking of getting an inspection camera for smartphone, something like that, just to take a peek inside the cylinder, can they be rotated to see the valve color too?
And now to completely hi Jacque me own thread, you know how when you look at a set of well loved cylinder heads, the valves will have different colors. Sometimes you'll see only a couple that are running a sort of whitish color. This is commonly attributed to those particular cylinders running lean.
But I've also read, what's really going on is the whitish colored valves are the correct mixture, it's the dark valves that are running too rich. I've seen some A&P websites that discuss what a happy exhaust valve looks like, the aviation folks take a lot of interest in that, and it's kind of interesting. I run a pretty sharp tune so I want to keep an eye on it. The plugs look real good as far as I can tell.