but honestly, some of their explanations were all over the place, not really addressing the tough questions head-on.
...
I'm left feeling like there's a whole lot of smoke and mirrors going on.
This exactly. The fact that none of the devs have actually just directly answered these questions head on in a couple of sentences, and are instead making people sit through an hour long recording, speaks volumes. It reminds of that quote from Vitalik about known scammer CSW:
In general, signaling theory says that if you have a good way of proving something and a noisy way of proving something, and you choose the noisy way, that means chances are it’s because you couldn’t do the good way in the first place.
Does it mean we can't verify that they have no access to the decryption key used to reconstruct the initial seed? It is still unclear how the whole decryption process works and how a hardware wallet knows that you underwent a KYC procedure to start recovering. Who sends it a decryption key because it may be a different device from that you created your setup?
It's not clear yet, but we know they
must have the means to decrypt it themselves. You can lose your hardware wallet and your seed phrase, and still recover your wallets on a new device. This means that everything needed to recover your seed phrase (i.e. the shares and their decryption keys) are stored by one or more third parties, since you need to provide absolutely nothing yourself, not even the original device.