The traverse of South Georgia Island has been made "thousands" of times and is a regular, guided adventure trip. It has also been re-created including the boat trip using period gear (apart from some modern comm gear and some facility to evacuate dropouts). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXU1ck7Eez0 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXU1ck7Eez0 and https://www.chimuadventures.com/blog/2016/09/south-georgia-hikes/

Nope. Not yet proves nothing.

I would too, if I could find 35mm wide chute cord that would be comfortable with a camera hanging on it.

I had one of the eyelets pull out of a body while standing in my skis talking to someone. The camera dropped as the strap zipped around my neck, but the end of the strap got snagged enough to arrest the drop and I caught the strap before the camera landed. I don't know how much redundancy one should need....

Boy, it's a lot more fun to discuss something that doesn't require math and participants who can understand math and believe in physics!

I use the stock strap on my OMD-EM1-II without any quick-disconnects. It's slim and nearly silent, and flexible enough to work with even in portrait orientation. I wrapped black tape behind the plastic keeper at each end to keep the loop flat. Usually I carry the camera on a PD clip secured to the right shoulder strap of my LowePro flipside 450AW backpack (handy, out of the sweat drip line, pretty stable if I need to boogie, and out of the way). I keep the strap over my neck most of the time where it doesn't snag and is always ready to protect the camera, and a handy hang when I flip the pack around to change lenses/batteries or get into the pack for something (it's really handy that way). I tried the PD strap with QD's for about a year - the QDs are nice and the strap is gorgeous but discreet. The hand strap is slick too, and the QD pucks can be installed to the tripod plate on the camera without interfering too much with either the clip mount or the tripod mount. I quit using that strap (but haven't disposed of it yet) because a) the QDs are kind of noisy - clunking against the camera body when hiking; b) the loop of strap tends to walk up the rectangular "D"-ring at the strap side of the QD (the ring is asymmetric in section and slides one way much more easily than the other) when it is just around my neck without any load, so the strap gets shorter and the loop more prominent to the point that it's annoying when walking and a perpetual irritation when I take the camera off the clip to use and find the strap way too short - usually about the moment the wildlife notices me, and c) the disconnects are too close to the body so there are four strands of fairly stiff, wide, slippery, gorgeous webbing that always seem to want to flop between my hands and the controls. With the strap removed, the QD pucks are still prone to getting in the way - too short to hang clear of the body. I'd like to find some tiny swivel disconnects to use with the stock strap. I did make an extension for the PD strap using stainless fishing leader, a snap swivel and a hollow braid sheath over it all to get some space between the body and the QD on the right side. That helped with the clutter factor but the walking buckle still bugged me too much. Without QDs I leave the strap on all the time, but take it off my neck when using the tripod unless it's really windy or a sketchy stance.

If you blame the lens for something that is going to obtain from any lens, you will waste your money. Focus stacking is a lot cheaper than one or more better (or at least more expensive) lenses.

Another good explanation of why the quality of the optics has no bearing on the amount of diffraction is found at https://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/diffraction-photography.htm. Diffraction is a function of wavelength and f-number. Distortion and imperfect focus are products of imperfect lens shapes and alignment. Depth of field is not related to diffraction - diffraction is a limit to the minimum area of a point of light perfectly focused at the sensor and is effectively inverse to DOF, although the mechanics of the two phenomena are fundamentally different. DOF is a simple geometric problem that can be described in terms of linear rays. Diffraction is entirely a product of the wave property of light. It is a small-scale effect and can go un-noticed if other artifacts of the optical system drown it out.

There's a pretty concise discussion of diffraction at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airy_disk if a few simple equations don't scare you off. The size of the first dark ring in the Airy disk produced by focusing a tiny light source onto a sensor or film with a given lens is the quantifiable measure of diffraction. The bottom line is that the diffraction is proportional to the f number and to the wavelength of the light, and there is little point (optically) in having sensor pixels smaller than about half the diffraction dimension. A calculation of diffraction for violet light (420nm) and f/8 gives a diffraction value of about 4 micro-meters (which would be 11 micro-meters at f/22) A table of camera sensor pixel sizes at https://letmaik.github.io/pixelpitch/index.html shows dimensions from 0.9 micro-meters up to over 8 micro-meters, and a good many of those listed are under 2 micro-meters so would be diffraction-limited even at f/8. The article notes that smaller pixels might be useful for other purposes such as noise reduction with oversampling, and of course the diffraction dimension would be smaller than the smallest listed pixel size at about f/4. I'm not sure how one identifies diffraction visually, or distinguishes it from other focusing errors, but it is at least mathematically predictable and avoidable. It should be noted that every bit of light passing through a lens is diffracted, not just that near the edges, but the amount of light that is spread to the rings outside the first minimum of the Airy disc is quite small, so the visible effect would be faint and may be imperceptible in the complexity of most images.

Check the Task Manager processes tab and see if some other process is hogging CPU. If so, try right clicking it and End Process. I had some generic sounding process bogging my system down after the last Creative Cloud update and this fixed it, apparently for good.

I like 1 and 8, but would like to see the water and sky brighter so they don't look so underexposed.

Check out the song "Look How Far" by Bruce Cockburn - a fairly poetic treatment of romance and friendship featuring sunset and wineglasses.

My error - the festival of colors is Holi, in March. Divali was late October, and more sedate.

Diwali or Divali - an Indian festival

They are called dolphins, and those are in EdmOnds, WA. Dolphins are clustered pilings placed to protect ships and other structures from each other, commonly near docks where the dolphins take the brunt of hard ferry landings. They also are used for moorings in areas where there is no room for barges and such to swing on an anchor.
I suspect that they are built with the top ends of the wooden piles (an individual log driven into the ground is a pile, a multiplicity of piles is piling, as if English wasn't weird enough already) lashed together with cable so they can flex more than they could if rigidly connected, thereby enabling the dolphin to absorb a lot of repeated impact and dissipate the energy safely. Modern large-scale versions like the ones pictured use more elaborately engineered superstructure that is more predictable and durable than the cable lashing originally used in the NW (the big-boy version of baling wire or duck tape).
This note nearly broke spell-check...