Could be an aspect of the time in the article, "many years" of these parties and a full week at a time, frictional points would be burned out a long time ago.

Could be an aspect of the time in the article, "many years" of these parties and a full week at a time, frictional points would be burned out a long time ago. I don't do the annual prison term from the article, but at family get togethers my MiL somewhat annoys me; I know the feeling is mutual; I probably cared about that twenty years ago, not so much now, other than as a source of comedy. I guess the programming analogy would be springing unit tests suddenly on an ancient codebase is going to result in a terrifyingly huge pile of errors after the first run of a complete set of tests, yet if unit tests were run throughout the life of the code, even if the total amount of failure were higher (which it probably would be) the peak amount of unit test failures at any given moment would likely be rather low, mostly zero or one failure at a time.