Real talk, the thing nobody's touching is who shows up to those taprooms. A guy who got canceled online has to face the 30 people who still care enough to drive out on a Tuesday, and that crowd is usually the most ticked off ones, not the fans. Two hours of getting grilled by locals in Ohio is a way harder room than any podcast. So the stunt part depends on one thing, does he go back to those same taprooms in six months when there's no camera around. One visit is easy, the second one is the tell.

Man, I feel for you on this one because that old tech probably cost you a lot of money and a lot of sleep over the years. I did the same thing for a while, not with leaf shutters but with certain autofocus modules, just parroting what someone told me was "impossible" without ever cracking one open myself. The truth is a lot of those "sealed unit" stories come from an era when the factory wanted you to send stuff back, not from the parts actually being unserviceable. As for rebuilding one without the jig, yeah it is doable but you will mess up the first one or two getting the blade timing right, so practice on a dead body first. Buy a couple of cheap broken X100 shutters off eBay and tear those down before you touch a customer's camera. The blades gotta go back in the exact order and orientation, so take pictures at every step, way more than you think you need. You didn't waste four months, you just learned late, and that happens to everybody in this trade at some point.