But how do you know it was the seal and not the pump just getting lucky? That guy Walt looked at a drip for 10 seconds and you're ready to crown him. Plenty of old timers will tell you all kinds of stuff with total confidence and half of it is just how they did it on their farm. A $4 seal kit is great until the pump bearing goes out 200 miles from home because the real problem was never fixed. And the distilled water thing gets tossed around a lot but plenty of guys run hose water for decades with no issue, so the crust you saw could've been from something else entirely. I'm not saying you got ripped off, but one fixed tractor doesn't prove anything. The guy at the shop who quoted you $340 might have seen a hundred of these where the seal was just the first thing to go.

There's a barber on YouTube I watch sometimes who did a mullet removal on a dude and the before and after looked like two different guys. The lineup alone took like ten years off his face before she even touched the top. Hair really is wild like that.