... but also by then the PPM should have been well understood by Cumulus executives.
But it was not. The fact that they had nobody on the various "study groups" and pre-launch committee (I was on just about all of them) shows they did not understand that a big change was coming.
A few of us saw early PPM devices as early as about 1995 in the skunk works on the third floor in Columbia and there was plenty of PPM talk at the annual consultant's fly-in in the 90's... yet Cumulus did not seem to think that it would be an issue.