Brian,
I've lost your point in the extensive quote. Is it that communications about complex matters such as the quality of safety-mandated inspections in airlines are less good than they should be?
Frankly, I find the UA event puzzling. Clearly, someone inside the airline detected something of which no one else there had been aware, namely that a certain step, a check step, in an AD had not been complied with. Good for them!
And someone else decided that a very public grounding of all their airplanes of a particular type was the appropriate response. The check step was trivial; it was all over with very quickly and the airplanes were back flying. There had been no in-flight incidents in half a decade related to the AD (this is very different from previous incidents with other airlines, in which the safety of flight was a real consideration). So why not spread the checks over a few days and minimise the disruption?
PBL