I don't know what axe you have to grind - perhaps you are a great mechanic who is asked to deal with tough, intermittent problems often - but I think your attack is excessive. Though I, arguably, got a deal on the extended labor, it was possibly extended only becasue the electrician initially misdiagnosed the problem as being due to the spiral cable. If he did, two of my three trips there were unnecessary. He replaced that special ordered part and sent me on my way, and that was after I had to return a 2nd time for the specially ordered part. After the replacement, if he had taken 10 minutes to road test it, he would have almost surely have seen the interimittency recur, as we did within 5 minutes when we drove home. The shop had closed for the day and so we could not immediately take it back, requiring another, i.e., 3rd trip.
I may well have paid $250 for a part that didn't need to be replaced. I will never know, but it seems like a heck of a coincidence that the new part solved nothing (creating the EXACT same symptoms as before)whereas the grounding fix solved everything.
Also, this shop was 20 miles away in a crappy part of town where I had to spend many hours, stuff I didn't feel was necessary to mention, lest I seem like an elitest. Twice during the three trips, I noticed that the electrician was looking at a wiring diagram from the wrong car, so he was a little disorganized - to be kind. Also, the main point of my post was to talk about the grounding problem.
I thought my e-mail suggested I was somewhat sympathetic to the difficulty of solving interimittent problems, in this case one that my independent Toyota shop would not even tackle. I said I was "not unhappy". Apparently, that was not good enough for you. Sorry.
In any event, the point of my post was not really to complain but to add further chorus to the issue with steering wheel grounding problems on Siennas, so I hope we can let this rest.
I wish you peace in your life!
D