As I watched that thread unfold, I was very impressed with your patience. I would have bailed out a long time ago. I'm also impressed with your knowledge.
Taking this thread to PM would violate the spirit of rule number 10. We may need to amend rule 10 to make that more explicit now that we have PM enabled. On the other hand, if the thread degenerated into chit-chat, continuing the thread would violate rule 3. As long as it's technical, the thread is the way to go. And I trust your judgement to know the difference.
We have longer threads. And many threads seem targeted to the original poster. I don't see any harm in either quality in a thread.
So my opinion: great work!