I am in favor of environmental causes but you seem to discount at least one possibility. The person could be either exaggerating or outright lying. People love to exaggerate problems. The other day a user told me that a particular synchronization froze for over 45 minutes doing nothing right in the middle of it. I sent her the timestamped log file that showed there was no pause in the synchronization and that the entire process took less than 15 minutes. This type of thing is very common.

In addition to commonly exaggerating problems, some people lie to further an agenda. Maybe an employee thinks their nephew deserves a shot at developing the company website so they become hypercritical of everything you do. Or maybe a sailor with subjective memories just doesn't like what fishing boats are doing.

In any case, anecdotal reports should be taken as a call for further study, not as a call to draw conclusions.