I'll throw in what I know. CAPS means something along the lines of cummins, accumulated, pressure system. Shame on me for not knowing the whole beef on these, as I have spent a fair amount of time working on them. I am sure that there are many others who know tons more on here. The CAPS pump is similar to the VP-44 in a few ways, it is sensitive to fuel quanity, quality, temperature, and it is rotary. It does however use oil to lubricate the two pistons that do the pumping, however, the rotor is subjected to fuel volume and quanity for it's cooling and lubrication. The tolerances are quite slim, and as you can imagine, the environment that these engines operate in, offer the whole thing no mercy. No excuses should be made, it isn't a briggs&stratton, but figure how many times the rotor has gone around at 250K at 1:1

Anyhow, the lift pump is not like the ISB set-up, it is only used during cranking to prime the injection pump, and has a unique housing to allow for it to turn-off and bypass with little restriction during engine running. This will allow you to check fuel pressure and restirction at one point, bump the key, and you'll see pressure while the lift pump primes, leave you guage on the pressure side of the pump, start the engine, and now you can check for restriction... ... I used to feel like I was cheating when I got to check two things with one guage, at one point

Lift pump probs obviously lead to hard starts. The pistons and the springs in the front end of the pump were the source of early CAPS pump failures, but they have since fixed that issue. The other very important fact of this pump's happiness, is that the pressure in the accumulator module is what the ecm is asking for. If it is not, then the reason for that must be found, otherwise the accumulator and the ECM get into a big stink that leads to the engine and the operator wondering "WTF, where's the fuel, whoa, where did that fuel come from????"

Performance goes to the dump, timing normally gets waaaaaay retarded at lower rpms, and you have a tractor pull smoke with tater-tot power... ... ... ... ... ... ... ..... and... ... ..... the longer it gets run like that, the higher the repair bill

I don't know what is wrong with you friend's freighliner, but a guess would be accumlator pressure, there are a million other things I could chatter about this thing, but I don't know what the symtoms are. If the pumping parts of the pump are failing, it is easy to find, metal in the snubber valve, but you have to see it to know what it is. Also, the accumulator pressure is rather high, not like HPCR, but like 3-10K, and it is best to monitor that through a program like INSITE that Cummins sells.
I have flapped enough cheeks, hope this sheds some light for you, sorry to hear about it, have seen some bad situations myself.
Russell