It's a fragile mod - I broke one of my posts by following their instructions but I just superglued it back together.

Trying to pry a screwdriver under the rubber ring (as their directions state) is just dumb. They should have the ring pushed off of the cutout and let the installer gently push the ring back over the cutout after tightening the screw. That's what I did on the second post and it worked much better.

I didn't see it as being "off the rails". He is just saying don't rush to judgement based on secondhand hearsay. Pinbits isn't here to offer an actual explanation of why they disappeared, so we don't really know for sure. Hopefully they retired and moved to Maui.

Cognitive dissonance
In the field of psychology, cognitive dissonance is the perception of contradictory information. Relevant items of information include a person's actions, feelings, ideas, beliefs, values, and things in the environment. Cognitive dissonance is typically experienced as psychological stress when persons participate in an action that goes against one or more of those things. According to this theory, when two actions or ideas are not psychologically consistent with each other, people do all in their power to change them until they become consistent. The discomfort is triggered by the person's belief clashing with new information perceived, wherein the individual tries to find a way to resolve the contradiction to reduce their discomfort.