Well documented post! I will confess to not reading the 300+ combined pages. But I think both of the requirements you reference are met. The merchant has the agreement of the customer.
I think everyone can agree the customer has legal recourse...but the real question that you can probably help answer is as follows: At what point will the bank / cc company consider the situation to be too far in the past to assist the customer with recovering their funds? An earlier post referenced 90 days...but maybe 6 months? 1 year? 10 years?
Perhaps the internet detectives can find out more inside information on this company...but let's say there have been 4 orders @ $8k each. It's not like $32,000 is just sitting in the bank account of ESE incorporated, waiting to be withdrawn by the cc issuing bank. ESE has used that money for something. All we have are some really confusing pictures showing an autoclave with a Photoshopped logo, two guys with a 20 year-old 5axis, and perhaps the most baffling image of all: A carbon wheel, sitting inside said 5axis, next to a half-wheel shaped chunk of aluminum. I've starred at that image for 10 minutes trying to imagine what the hell could be going on there. It's part of the tooling?..still sitting there among the chips, but the finished wheel is already complete? I can't come up with any reasonable answer.
Merchant agreements are great legal docs...the bank has the vendor signed up to accept whatever they decide is correct...The customer has also signed up to whatever the bank decides. But the reality is this: if the money is gone (i.e. not effortless for the bank to recover with a little paperwork threat and ETF magic), they are going to shrug their shoulders and whip out another nice PDF that explains a year after the customer was charged for a product that they agreed would not be shipped immediately, said customer is very likely S.O.L.
