Riverside observatory is a good spot, but I've had the opposite experience there. A guy once told me my Saturn stack was overprocessed and "looked like a cartoon", so I spent thirty minutes dialing it back, only to realize my original version was actually sharper when I got home and compared them side by side. Sometimes the old timers have a point, sure, but they also get comfortable with one workflow and treat it like gospel. If your moon shot was already looking decent to you, maybe the real issue wasnt the alignment but that you were chasing someone else's definition of "sharp". That said, three pixels is three pixels, so I'd probably have listened too, just not as fast.

The real problem was the wiring, not the box, and opening the wall wouldn't have saved you from a hidden live line behind insulation. Sometimes you just get lucky with old houses, and a bit of caution plus a voltage tester is all you really need.