Did you ever try squinting at it from across the street to see if that counts as a real test? I skipped the distance test on a logo once and felt pretty silly when it looked like a blob on a banner at the county fair. My cutoff now is 40 feet, since that is where most signs and boxes get seen from.

Three separate stylists making the same mistake at one shop tells me nobody there is training the new hires on basics. You see this everywhere now, the senior person is too busy to watch and the new person just copies whatever looks right in a video. The fix is simple, someone needs to stand there and correct them for a week before they touch a real head.

Man, I read a whole thread on an aviation forum about this exact thing last year. The old heads were saying torque stripes are just a visual check so a mechanic can glance at it and know it hasn't moved, not proof the twist is good. A pretty stripe on a bad pigtail is still gonna fail when it matters.