Then let me make my view of StreamScale not being a troll perfectly clear. I think they're good faith entrepreneurs taking a risk and developing something new, patenting it ($30-50,000) and selling it. That's not trolling. Shutting down academics from the UofTK is not a realistic source of revenue; it is however reasonably defending their rights which is expected of them now if they're to defend themselves later.
> that's not what the patent claims cover
Careful. You're not a patent attorney (and neither am I). But my attorney told me the engineer to not read claims and certainly not to read them to understand them. (Definitely don't write claims either but that's another matter entirely.) The Supreme Court has said that the claims section is the hardest legal document to write. You both want to avoid prior art (narrow) and preclude inventing around (broad). That's hard to do and hard to understand.
Read the specification for what it's teaching. That's what it's there for. The specification has to teach+support the claims and this one says Galois field all over the place.
Lastly, never say I feel like you're deliberately missing the point. Just don't.