I look at it more like people who wear completely offensive clothes or shout vitriol at passersby. If they show you who they are early it's easy to simply ban/ignore them and move along.
It's worse when they hide who they are until you have had an entire conversation with them and spent so much...
Did you read the recall? It is not a bad design, if was an altered process without engineering review. That is still a problem and will hopefully be addressed systemically rather than individually, but it isn't a "defective design."
I hope the fix is simply removing the cover, cleaning the lube off and replacing the cover with a new pad. While the river works it does look bad and redesigning the cover with a mechanical retention clip will probably take longer than the NHTSA is going to want. Any interim rivet while they...
Most likely because the queue for AWD was quite long when he asked and they were not confident an AWD order placed at that time would be delivered before their place in the Beast queue.