Man, 7 percent would've had me losing my mind too.

That Ray guy sounds like he knew what he was doing but I gotta disagree that you can't learn this stuff on your own. I've been spraying for 12 years and never had anyone hovering over me, I just burned through a lot of material and messed up enough jobs to figure out where silver flips. The trick is you gotta pull it outside in real sun before you call it done, not trust the bay lights no matter how good they look. Sitting in a shop watching one old dude doesn't teach you half of what five years of your own screwups will. Some guys need a hand on their shoulder, others just need to eat a comeback or two.

Something similar bit us on the layer settings side. Went through a whole sheet set and every viewport came out with the wrong lineweights after a point release. The part that really gets me is these updates never show up as a prompt or a changelog you'd actually read. They just push it, the default flips, and you find out weeks later when a sub calls you confused. I've started keeping a copy of my plot settings and templates in a versioned folder so I can diff them after any update. Takes five minutes and it has saved me more than one revision cycle. The real fix would be the software asking before it changes my defaults, but I doubt that's coming.