I was kind of surprised too. I have some conjectures about the internal politics from the output that I observed (super friendly, super helpful support team; development team knew it was an issue, and had orders from above?).

And yes, the ELEMNT is an ok cycling computer, but I think with a few bug fixes, it would work 'at least tolerably' for hiking (that is to say, at least as well as the Garmin Edge 510 did). The Edge 510 was not a great hiking computer, but for 'datalogging with a separate battery from my phone, and capable of speaking ANT+ to my heart rate monitor', it at least captured correct data...