What is "HA" in this scenario? It could be a number of things (FCI, AlwaysOn Availability Groups, etc.)

With regard to the Reddit article, what kind of deadbeat, out of his depth CTO fires somebody on their first day for a mistake like that? It's no way to...

Weird. Try scripting it out and see what error message you get instead of using the GUI.

The replica is on a server that's in the same cluster? They're both SQL 2014 Enterprise Edition?

On the  Restore Transaction Log tab on the log-shipping configuration screen there is an option to "Force disconnect users". If you select it it will mean that anybody querying...

This is what I mean. Assume I have the following backups:

12.00 FULL
12.30 TLOG
13.00 TLOG
13.20 FULL(COPYONLY)
13.30 TLOG
14.00 TLOG

If I wanted to restore to 13.35,...

That's expected behaviour though. I would only expect the GUI to show me one full backup (copy-only or otherwise) before the point in time to which I wished to restore, and...

Are you saying you restored a copy-only backup and then restored subsequent t-log backups to it? That's normal.

How was the CPU at the same time? I've heard of maxed out CPU causing lease timeouts. Is there anything helpful in the cluster log? Also, was there anything useful...

I agree that automating it could be a bad idea, because there's also the issue of direct seeding potentially blocking your backup jobs, as described here .

From the link:...