I'm not familiar with those hacks, never cared for spotpass.
The reason why MAC address filtering is not recommended as a security measure is because they can be sniffed and spoofed.
I wasn't talking WEP vs MAC but, again, in general and in the context of open wifi.
Your sarcasm/joke/silliness detector may need a little bit of a tune up.
That said I have seen many times when doing network based hacks over the years the sorts of troubles people get into (the time people decided arp poisoning was a nice plan because setting up another access point on a PC was annoying being among the more amusing), this despite my normally deeming them system administrator type skills. Stuff like the OP covers is real skills to pull off, stuff like covered otherwise here not so much.
In some cases it might be the fault of people just issuing arcane commands and not explaining the flow/thought process (or possibly assuming others have it) but the end result is still the same.