Ew! Your speculations sound based on reason and research! I, on the other hand, was relying on pure stupidity.

Personal anecdote about welding clutches: turns out it's really easy to do! The clutch pedal fork in my '95 4Runner broke, so I ended up getting my entire clutch system replaced/rebuilt. As part of the rebuild, my mechanic's parts supplier offered a deep discount on a racing clutch they recently started manufacturing. Somehow, this clutch sat incorrectly in the housing and presented a partial gap of a few micrometers, which the supplier assured us would be negligible within a few days. A couple of weeks later, I was running errands all day and suddenly smelled and heard something awful and couldn't depress my clutch pedal, even when trying to stand on it. That was a fun day of abusing my clutch start override every time I stopped and wasn't on a decline or had to change between forward and reverse!