In the below example, all inserters have the same settings, set to enable when receiving a 1 tick pulse from a pulse-generator. All the chest inserters work (even regular inserter) while none of the belt inserters work (even stack inserter). I expect this is to do with a delay while the inserter 'locates' an item on the belt, while box inserters don't need to.

Aligning behaviour to work with 1-tick pulse would facilitate sending instructions for a single insertion for belt-inserters, although a workaround is to send the enable command for e.g. 10 ticks instead of just 1.