Ah... [at least I'm familiar with the concept of people being made artificially...] That really does explain quite a lot.
Well, the method you skipped over as time consuming and unlikely to work was actually quite valid, but hinges on you believing that what seems complicated can work out quickly enough. The drawback is that you do have to rely on others to have the same feelings about something as you do, but the benefit is you'll have pushed it from a direction where Tide may have been more likely to accept eventually, rather than outright reject. So you do know some of the other ways, you're just not thinking of them as valid courses of action.