Not necessarily, I think what he means is that for a while we were basically going through their NOS of 17t cogs, and it was only recently, when the market demand for their 17t cogs for sick skidz increased, did they start producing 17t cogs again. Maybe it's some quirk in the manufacturing process that cropped up in the first batch... who knows?

Mine worked fine, and it was almost definitely from the new batch. I ordered it from Ben's and they were out of stock of these for months before I ordered mine. I assume this was the lag time between when they ran out of NOS and when their first batch of new cogs ecame available.