Paul won't refer to the above person. I will!
After having been in the hobby for the last few years, I've come to realize that a great deal about the hobby has to do with powers of observation and memory of the details. A prop's back-story may or may not be verifiable, so you examine screen shots, production photos and any visual material and compare them against the real life object at hand. (I say "memory of the details" because you can get so myopic you lose sensitivity towards another feature. You sometimes have to take a step back and refresh your view of the whole prop).
Gino has good powers of observation. As much as he bullies people on how accurate he is, there are some blatant errors that show myopia that any fan can be vulnerable to. The irony is that I don't consider his Vader to be the "cast off untainted originals" and having the nearly stepped-off-the-screen look as he believes, and yet he has one of the absolute best and most life-like Yodas in the world. If you can abstract someone like Gino from all this "provenance" and "secret LFL sources" you have someone whose artistic eye can truly take him places. Since the Yoda he uses was a fan sculpt, the laurels of setting up a 1:1 scale display is solely based on a fan's powers of observation and patience. Were the values of the community reassessed along these lines, Gino would undoubtedly be a hero rather than having to stand in the limelight of half-truths, implications, bullying and deceit. Instead of trying so hard to play King of the Hill, he would have - in my eyes - been a hero.
(And as we've seen recently, it turns out that Gino's secret hush-hush LFL sources - specifically with respect to the inside of a screen-used Fett helmet - his source was a photo from vadermania who took various photos while at the LFL Archives. So Tom has now shared various archive photos on the Den. I suppose we
all have secret LFL sources now! Thanks, Tom!)
We therefore need a greater spirit of cooperation. Paul will catch things Carsten misses. Carsten will catch things that I miss. And so on. When we combine our observations, we have a collectively improved understanding of a prop.
Jez, you did a great review of the screenused AT-AT driver helmet. You pointed out things I never noticed before. I honestly don't study the stormtrooper-related stuff to any level of depth, so your video coverage was most educational!