What an attitude. Clearly they don’t care about their customer base! I’m surprised they get return customers for any of their lathe parts for any of their lathes, etc, if they treat their customers like that.
However there is usually two sides to a story. I await an alternative recollection of your conversation with myford UK.
At the same time, the 254 was designed and produced much later than the rest of their products (the whole ‘ML’ series). Everything since is simply sourced from outside manufacturers, I expect. The new ‘myford’ is (I assume) a completely new company simply rebadged with a well known company name that went down the drain years ago. A bit like some of the car marques, such as MG?