"Rack held so well…"
Yeah, that reminds me of what the whole difference is between modern roof racks and the gutter-mounted kind. Modern roof racks have a lot of “give” to them because they are mounted to the roof panel itself. Seriously, mounting a roof rack to a broad sheet-metal roof panel to which the designers have added only enough internal reinforcement to keep it from oil-canning in the wind at highway speed, instead of to a “frame-sturdy” corner of the car’s body like they did in the “old days” has got to be near the top of the list of the dumbest car-design ideas of recent times. The old gutter-mount systems, if the rack itself was sturdy, had no “give” whatsoever, no matter how you stressed them. I used to routinely stand on my various gutter-mounted roof racks to reach things in the attic of the garage, or when tying awkward cargo to the rack, or simply as a handy place to take a photo to avoid getting foreground clutter in the view. When I did that, even with my old Subaru, there was no flex in the rack, or the body of the car, at all. With a Yakima system mounted to the “modern” roof rack on my Blazer, I have only dared stand on the rack most gingerly, and only while taking great care to distribute my weight halfway between the cross-bar mounts and while leaning well out onto the boat to transfer some of my weight to the other cross bar as well, and even then it caused the roof panel to sag more than half an inch at the locations of the rack mounts closest to me, while the factory rack mounts visibly deformed as well (a mere 60 pounds (estimated) per rack mount is enough to cause the factory mounts to deform and cause the roof to sag terribly, yet with my old racks, I could put all my weight on just one of the four attachment points without a care in the world). If I were to just hop up on my current rack with the total lack of concern that I did with the racks on previous cars, I’d permanently cave-in the roof of my car and probably destroy the factory roof-rack mounts too. Further, not only does my new rack have practically no ability to carry a load compared to all my old ones, I’m sure there’s no way that such a flimsy attachment system has as much resistance to being tugged by the wind, or the forces of sudden braking or bumps in the road either.