My take on the failures is that the barrels themselves are not threaded to a consistent tolerance (I believe this is why Muller stopped offering the aluminum chokes for Optima bore barrels). If you get a barrel who's thread section was bored a little oversize, now you don't have the steel barrel backing up the aluminum choke, and there's a gap between the choke that eventually the aluminum choke will expand to fill. If there is not enough "give" to expand, it cracks and fails.