And I have private messages from other pro photographers that share that opinion as well.
Well, you can have mine in public. I think that was uncalled for. You'd be hard pressed to see Andrew ever chasing red herrings, he usually stays on the mark. Which is what you tend to do when you know what you're talking about.
I've seen many discussions taking off on wild irrelevant tangents, and get totally lost in the fog. Let's not do that.
Mostly these problems have simple explanations and simple solutions if you know where to look. But every once in a while a real bug in software comes up, and then these threads can go on forever with nobody being able to explain what's happening. I think that's the case here - and in these cases updating is often the only right answer. That's what I think the OP should do.
That said, I almost got banned myself from this forum (not this subforum) a year or so ago. It was just something somebody said that rubbed me the wrong way, and I fired back without thinking. Before my brain started operating normally again, it was caught by a moderator. I had to eat it up, and I had no problems with that. These things happen.