It's always fun seeing these other people. This one's kind of a nasty piece of work, though. I mean, I can sympathize with his mind picking away at some odd little thing for ages. It's just the "Why isn't my teacher, who by the way I don't even like, pulling dirty tricks on my opponent for me" bit that bothers me; the guy seems totally selfish and lacking in honour.
Still, the "boil down" thing is interesting--I have the definite feeling that it's an idiom imported into Japanese from English, but maybe not--it doesn't seem to have quite the same meaning. Was it imported and then the meaning morphed? Or does it mean something different because it was an independent use of the same phrase?