Stuart, after emailing a number of senior people at MAC, it was Rita again in service who informed me that they would be issuing a refund. I suspect it was Brenda Hipsher (brendah@macgroupus.com), the Toyo brand manager for MAC, who finally authorized the refund. But I can't be certain. I've since returned the holders and am currently still awaiting my money back.
In the meantime, I purchased 1 box of the redesigned Toyo holders from Kumar (in this thread) for testing. Upon initial inspection, they are perfect. Same great build on the holders but this time with very solid black aluminum dark slides. I couldn't get light to show through them, but just for comparison, I'm running a similar test before ordering more. But I can't fathom that they'd let any light through. The slides are solid metal. And not cheap, thin metal that you can bend by hand (thinking of the dark slides on my RZ) — no, these are very solid. And quite good looking too. My bad slides and the bad replacements were both 18g and the new metal slides are 35g. But you don't need to weigh them to tell the difference. It's really obvious.
Knowing that solid metal slides are available, I can't imagine being ok with semi-transparent plastic slides. I'm not willing to take the unnecessary risk.
From what I can tell, no one in the U.S. carries this redesign yet. But they are available in Japan. Many thanks to Kumar for hooking this up. I anticipate ordering the full set soon.
Good luck.
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