I think the one thing I will address, because it's kinda funny (this is not a response to Jack) is "did it really take Dan that long to figure out the low hat is just made with junk James happened to have on hand?"
Smarter every Day has talked about this a lot because it's the backbone of that channel: almost any sort of realization in a structured YouTube video is a kind of fiction, a recreation for the the benefit of the audience, for the needs of the story, an emotional truth rather than a literal one.