Well, not really "interesting". You made a bold statement about Hoffstätter being the sole maker from beginning to end and I commented on that initially. As I said, I tend to agree with you but I haven't seen any evidence that would unequivocally support your very confident statement.
The answers to the other questions are on the forum. The point I was making by asking what I did was to see whether you would search the forum to see if the information is here. You didn't and of course you don't have to but post #3 towards the top of this thread would have helped. I suppose what I'm saying is this: although you clearly admire Jo, he doesn't have a monopoly on finding verifiable and reliable period sources and extracting the useful parts in order to increase understanding of a particular item, event etc. He is, of course, very good with small badges and I was a little harsh in saying that he didn't know anything about youth items back in 2011 or so when he joined this forum. Of course he did but he was not a "HJ" guy and in any case, his emphasis was badge construction, fakes, makers etc. Whatever, he made some great contributions in his area of expertise on this forum during his time here but I don't personally think that there is anything truly new to learn about the
Potsdam badge (<--I'll get that page finished at some point..) in terms of its history.
What would be useful is if someone were to make an exhaustive study of the fakes, the variations in the MMs etc and also to clear up the issue of whether Hoffstätter really was the sole maker. What would be very useful too is if someone could study the good badges and establish a chronology i.e. which are the early badges and which are from later production runs.