So the only lesson you take away from these two threads is to continue avoiding direct contact with Juerd?

No not at all. I wasnt getting any email replies from him. I sent him a test case via email. He ran it and it worked for him. So I revised it and tye tried it and saw the problem and I sent him the fixed one. And he has said nothing since then via email, so I filed it as a RT ticket. And there has been no movement on the RT ticket I supplied a few weeks ago. But since he replied to me here, it seems that he is willing to work with me in some fashion. And I will definitely keep him in the loop. Although I prefer he stay in the loop by following me on github.

And his (and your) insistence on paying money for rapid feedback means I'd rather just do everything on my own because I have urgent demands for rapid evolution of this module and can no longer play backseat and/or pay money.

I'm still wondering what your goal is with these posts.

Hmm, well I wanted to get a feel for what (not)? to do and how (not)? to do it. The most likely thing to occur is that DBIx::Simple will be forked and I will document each change as I commit on github. I wont make any sort of CPAN release for a long time because we just need changes locally now. Over time, the various things I do might make their way into his code or a separate module.

But the issue that my bug raises is actually a point of divergence. I dont think he will ever accept that patch and change his code to quit using fiddling with reference counts. And my test case MUST work for what we are doing locally.