I skipped the first half because I noticed the third pie chart was a fucking oval

That storyline was painful. It suffered so much from everything bending around the main character. Also, one particular setting had me enraged as someone who works in IT and has previously worked in the medical services.

I don’t know the history of the photo, but I know some Kopi Luwak ‘producers’ force feed the civets coffee cherries to maximise production. So I can’t say this is a natural shit for a civet, because it could be human induced.

Leave the tinfoil hat on. There is a precedent for exactly what you are describing. When radios went from valve to transistor, radio manufacturers kept the number of transistors low and only slowly increased radio quality over the years. They were able to make higher quality radios from day 1 but didn’t so they could sell more radios.