I have talked to some of the principles involved in the lawsuit. As far as I could tell, it was just someone upset over the loss of a friend, going after the power company and the boat builder. They went after the boat builder on the grounds that "the technology existed to eliminate the problem but the boat builder was not including it for profit reasons".

As I understand it, Coleman settled by agreeing to change the mast because they did not want a long court battle with their name on it (they had something else going on) and they did not want any big cash settlements.

I think some of the people involved expected Hobie to adopt a fiberglass mast. They were not engineers and there were some small boats with unstayed fiberglass masts. The dealers were saying these were safe from overhead power lines. For those of you who do not know, a 1980's fiberglass mast for a Hobie would be very heavy.

The comptip was adopted because it was the most practical method of meeting the agreement.

To me it seems the comptip came about because of an agreement between 2 parties, one did not know much about catamaran sailing and one that did not know much about engineering and manufacturing.