Agreed - there really is no excuse, development-wise, for the UI being this poorly designed. 30 minutes of easy work could take this to a point where it would be unlikely somebody would make a mistake.

100% Agree, there are a million little things that could have been done differently/better. My point really was trying to focus on that the delay in follow-up was completely understandable (also unfortunate) and that there was definitely some low hanging fruit for improvement (your suggestions being chief among them). This is, however, the UI/UX use end up with when you produce a specific spec and farm it out to the lowest bidder.

According to the Twitter thread the option at the bottom of the list (False Alarm) was added as the fix to this problem. Making a reasonable UI was apparently not an option.

Who says it's not an option?

There's likely a CMS of some sort for adding messages, so adding a false alarm one probably just meant someone with admin access just needed to fill out a web form.

UI changes, even simple ones, would take a little longer.