One of the best predictors of successful outcomes for a therapy patient, is that the patient trusts the therapist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therapeutic_relationship
This position is roughly 80 years old. Personally I think the best heuristic for telling wether a therapist is any good is whether they believe the connection between the two of you is more important than their personal preferred theoretic approach.
Relevant scholarship:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodo_bird_verdict
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_factors_theory
I model therapy as an art and craft, a special subset of social skills, just like empathetic listening or building rapport, rather than a deterministic applied science like EEng or MechEng. Then, getting different results from the same therapist doing the same technique is exactly what I would expect because they probably aren't doing all the non-verbal communication which makes the largest impact in social situations. Just like Scott has the passive ability of making people around him devolve into really civil calm discussions, a desired social effect is not something easily reproduced by others, nor learned in many cases less rare than Scott's reality distortion field of civility.
I feel like I'm being a little mean and condescending here. My apologies, I've been up too late. But I think it's poor practice to throw stones at glass houses of the academy, without doing some good scholarship first.
Crux elasticity might be better phrased as 'crux sensitivity'. There is a large literature on Sensitivity Analysis, which gets at how much a change in a given input changes an output.
I'd wager saying 'my most sensitive crux is X' gets the meaning across with less explanation, whereas elasticity requires some background econ knowledge.