Start with their words, not your tech talk.

That per-decade rule from @valallen is smart for saving shots. Makes me wonder about the film's original age though. Like, was that 2012 Ektar fresh when frozen, or already sitting on a store shelf for two years? The clock starts at manufacture, not when you buy it. A roll from a cold-stored brick shot in 2015 might act totally different than one from the same brick shot now. The batch history gets lost.

Wait, he paid for a whole alternator based on that?

Found a set of my own from a Denver project where I used the wrong text style for a note. It was like, 0.2 points bigger than the spec. The whole approval got held up for a week because the reviewer thought it was a revision cloud they missed. I spent two days just proving the font was the only thing that changed.

Watering down dust just makes mud, @ross.jason. That mud then dries into a hard, cracked layer that's way harder to clean up than the original dust was. You're basically trading one problem for a bigger one.