I was right there with you on the cheap probe hate train. Bought one two years ago, it lasted a week before I wanted to throw it in the chip bin, and I told everybody at the shop it was junk. Then I actually sat down and read the setup guide instead of rushing it like I knew everything. Turns out I had the stylus way too tight and my feed was cranked up, so of course it popped on the first crash. Fixed those two things and now it holds within a thou all day long. My old way was eyeballing a piece of paper and feeling for drag, which was fine until it wasn't. So no, you are not just cheap and stubborn. You just learned the same lesson I did, which is sometimes the tool is fine and the user is the problem.

Small thing but he didn't actually pull over before the tow truck, you said the truck was already on the way. Not trying to nitpick, just that detail matters because the whole story is about a random guy stopping when nobody asked him to. Mine was a guy who helped me push my dead Civic off a busy road in the rain, and we still grab breakfast once a month. Ten years now.