It's kind of the same thing I keep running into with cooking in general, where the cheap way is almost never actually the fast way, and you end up paying for it in time instead of money. I see it with stuff like making stock from scraps or grinding my own coffee, the savings are real but they only show up if you change your whole routine around them. The mushy thing is a good example, because it's not really about the salt or the bay leaf, it's about paying attention to the beans themselves and how old they are. That's the part nobody warns you about, that bulk bins sit there for who knows how long and you have to actually check. Salt in the soak is the move though, my grandma did it that way and never had a problem.

Man, the puppet thing isn't even the wild part to me. What gets me is that people watched that movie for years and argued about which shots looked fake, and the whole time the "fake" looking ones were the real goat just standing there being a goat. That's the funniest part. A real animal can look faker than a robot because we're so used to bad CGI that our brains flag anything that moves weird as effects. So Nate probably pointed at the actual live goat and said "see, that's the dumb puppet" and felt real smart about it. The director basically got a free pass on his broken robot by letting a goat take the blame.