When you find a method that workd for you, and you have repeatable sucess rates, chances are its NOT you! I've grown 4 year old seed, stored in a cigar box, with 80% sucess rate. Nope, I'm calling it, Sweet Seeds has some serious seed issues I think. I'm going to pm them about it and see what they say.
I'm still not fully convinced that I'm not still screwing something up in my seedling workflow. Even though I have long stretches of perfect germ rates, I get bad rashes of really low rates, while seemingly not changing anything in the flow. I do sterilize everything that touches beans...heck I'm about to start autoclaving everything lol.
It did suddenly come to my attention through research that growers with well water often have much higher levels of natural pythium spores than city treated water (because the chloramine kills the pythium apparently). So that might explain how my beans could be dying right after cracking or planting. But doesn't account for the long stretches of good rates.