How many of those 12 tools did he actually preset before the job, and did he keep a spare probe on the shelf for when one gets bumped?

Been there man, same thing on a 200. Drove me nuts.

Swapping your stage order just feels like a band-aid to me. The real problem was that a form tag went missing and nobody caught it for 9 weeks, and flipping columns around does not stop that from happening again. That weekly count Derek sends you is the actual fix, since it forces a human to look at the numbers instead of trusting a dashboard that was clearly lying. I would go further and check the form tags on every lead source once a month, because a dead column can happen to any stage, not just the cold one. Renaming or reordering your stages might give you a fresh look for a week, but then your brain gets used to it and you are back to square one. Build the habit of a manual review and you do not need the trick at all.