Back in 09 I watched a guy at a Chevy dealer in Toledo spend three days on a no start. Brand new Solus, every code pulled, live data for hours. Turned out the fuel pump ground was loose behind the kick panel and a $12 test light would have caught it in the parking lot. The scanner told him what the computer thought was wrong, not what was actually wrong. A vacuum gauge or a test light makes you touch the car and think about how it works. Screens are great once you already know what you're looking at. Your mileage may vary but that's been my experience.

My buddy ran a little writers group last year and made everyone map their short stories onto Polti's list as a joke, and then the joke stopped being funny when half the room found out they'd been writing "Vengeance" over and over with different names. The wild part was the other half had honestly been mixing stuff like "Rivalry" with "Madness" without knowing it, and those were the pieces that got the best feedback. He said the mashup thing basically forces you to make the prompt itself do the heavy lifting, same as you're saying, because you can't lean on the plot being fresh. After that they started a rule where every new prompt had to borrow from two boxes minimum and nobody could reuse a combo until everyone cycled through. It got messy fast but the stories got way better.