I was watching it from afar. As I recall, he bailed on his presentation and got back to it after being talked to (and threatened?) and presented his schlock. Now, not saying the guy was at all blameless, but I watched him presenting and thought to myself, ‘this guy doesn’t believe this stuff at all’.
It pissed me off that the folks in the US were not seeing the whole picture.
Yah, avoid most US chocolate as best as possible. There are some local/regional chocolatiers that are darn good, but likely not going over to Europe.