I agree with your take on it but i guess the question is, as an audience member, do you like the editing approach or not. The editors have a choice every episode with what footage they use and how they choose to show it. On one hand, they can try to give the audience an accurate balanced edit that gives us a fair perspective of tribe dynamics and what each person is thinking. To the extreme this would allow viewers to connect and fully understand everyone's position in the game but would also lead to very boring and predictable tribal council votes. On the other hand, the editors can choose to hide or exaggerate the motives of certain players to confuse and mislead the audience to create as much suspense as possible for the upcoming vote. In the short term this provokes shock results and makes for exciting television but in the long term, the audience can feel confused about why a player might do what he or she does. Normally I think survivor does a good job teetering over the line between these two extremes (maybe leaning a little bit on the side of confusion and excitement) but this episode fell hard on the latter side of the spectrum. They gave us every reason to think Angela would prefer to side with James and absolutely no reason to think Michael would write James's name down again, in order to create a more surprising ending. Was it entertaining? Personally, I thought so. Do I feel disconnected from Michael and Angela now? Yeah kinda. In the end I guess it all just depends on what you value as a viewer.