@chocaholic: "I’m smart" is not a rebuttal. I do appreciate your thoughtful postscript, but keep in mind that your comments, despite your intent, sure do come across as condescending with a heaping helping of hubris. I mean, "inexperienced"?? Holy crap, I go back to the ESL-57 & SP3.
I realize that you’ve clarified that that wasn’t your intent, & we both know how easy it is to misread tone. But jeez, even given the context, rereading your comment, I dunno -- you’ll have to excuse me if that’s how I interpret the wording. Again, no offense meant, but I stick to my gut reaction. At the risk of repeating myself one last time, your remarks still sound like unsupported confirmation bias to me. But whatever. As always, YMMV & I certainly don't want to get into a time-wasting "thing" here..
Little-known fact: "Snake Oil" originally meant "effective". When sold as a prescriptive a century ago, it produced real, if small, health benefits in part because of its high concentration of what we now know as omega-3 fats. The term became pejorative only when the market was flooded with ineffective knock-offs that did not contain real snake oil.
The moral is, one should always verify that what you buy is true snake oil, not some phoney imitation that contains no snake.