Who said anything about extended? Do you think there might be a period of time a person might be away such that they would not want their cat locked out the whole time, but their cat also has no chance of filling up their waste receptacles?
If the false positive rate is not 100%, their next try is likely to succeed. Unless, as I mentioned, the contraption just breaks entirely, which is why I'd be reluctant to have one of them in the first place.
We have no evidence that the failures are randomly distributed. What about when the failure mode is such that any time there’s not a massive blizzard outside, it works great. But when there is… icecat.
Sounds like you and I are actually in agreement here. It's not regularly-distributed but still occasional glitches I'd be worried about, it's the modes of total failure. Or as I like to put it: "gadgets break".
