We agree with you on most of this, minus what we and others believe is both predatory and illegal trading behavior by the funds in question.
T+2 is T+2. You either have the shares or you don't. When you don't, you cannot sell shares that you don't have, can't cover and can't locate.
We genuinely have no issues with shorts or longs when operating legally. January is what happens when market makers follow the law and ensure to locate correctly at T+2. Late March and April, however, are what happens when funds do not follow the law and fail to locate correctly at T+2.
Market makers will never risk their market making license, or their loan and borrow business, so they follow the T+2 requirements to avoid penalties, sanctions and worse.
Funds, on the other hand, sometimes like to think that they are smarter than the system. In this case, they jumped the gun to try to arbitrage faster than other funds, and violated the law.
We will execute our business and all of this will ultimately be noise in the mid and long term. We took action, however, as we care greatly about both our private shareholders and our public shareholders alike (retail and institutional).
We encourage an active two sided and fair market. We also work hard to support longs like ourselves as those betting against us are not our friends. It is acceptable for those doing that to make those bets. We just want to ensure that their bets are wrong, and painfully wrong at that.
May you and all of the others here on either side of the trade have a wonderful Easter holiday weekend with your friends and families.