HAL and I have communicated via private messages and I made sure there were no hard feelings or personal offense taken. I completely agree with every word of what you’ve said about the gratitude fan editors deserve for their work, and I have expressed gratitude to HAL for his wonderful edits.
My comments are primarily motivated by a desire to see these edits be as good as they can possibly be. I can see why you would call my “no excuse” wording “unfortunate”, and I admit I could have made the point less forcefully, but I was never intentionally implying that Cloak of Deception is a bad fan edit or that HAL is a bad editor