I'm guessing that a robotics company actually has very few analog-competent engineers. It may well have solved the issue if one of them had built an analog cir

I'm guessing that a robotics company actually has very few analog-competent engineers. It may well have solved the issue if one of them had built an analog circuit. A lot of engineers don't think about operating conditions when they first learn to build circuits, and run them near the edge of their specified tolerances, so moving the component into a "comfortable" range would fix it. However, if they were working with a COTS component and took some resistors off that, I doubt it was actually the right fix.