Had a similar thing happen with a furnace guy years back. I was all proud of myself checking temp rise and static pressure on every call, doing the whole song and dance with the manometer, and he just walks up and puts his hand on the flue pipe for two seconds. Said if it's too hot to hold your hand on for a count of five, you got a airflow problem, and now go find out why. Saved me a ton of time but it also made me feel dumb for about a week. The old timers learned on stuff that didn't have a bunch of fancy meters so they had to use their senses. We got spoiled with tools and forgot the basics. Your Tulsa guy was right, ears and hands will tell you more than a meter ever will on a lot of calls.

The part about the short prompt needing more work than a long one is what gets me, because I think that's backwards from how most people treat it. With a long prompt you have room to be messy, you can wander and still land somewhere. With two lines every word has to carry weight and there's nowhere to hide, so you keep swapping words trying to make each one do more. That's why version 2 was the best one, it came out before you started assigning jobs to every sentence. I've started giving myself a hard rule where I do three drafts max and then I post it even if I hate it, because the fourth draft is never fixing the prompt, it's just me avoiding the fact that I'm done. The dead brother and the boat didn't make it better, they made it safer to keep fiddling with instead of calling it finished.