Mike, Hal is alive and well. I communicate with him pretty much daily on another forum. You're right though, he knows his stuff and definitely has an opinion. No mixed words in his vocabulary.
Sophisticated test equipment, calibrated properly, can detect the minute differences in length of each pair, caused by their differing twist rates. If you have a switch or rack set up for 568B and you terminate by the A color code on a B jack, even if you do both ends the same, the cable should fail. Not all test equipment produces this result. You get what you pay for.
