Spin it however you want. "The fee agreement was never completed by the Corps, and the Corps did not complete any additional work on the 408 permit." i.e. there were issues.
Again, this is testimony to the US Senate. I'm quite confident Sims wouldn't have put it in the written testimony if the issues in working with the Corp were not indeed a partial driver.
The rest of your post is conjecture at this point. It remains to be seen what the effect is to the economics, as well as what the decision making process was behind the scenes (which technically hasn't been completed).
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