Big +1 on this. Many times on my Venue I'll accidentally block a fader when switching layers. If that actually caused the fader to fail, that would be a massive shortcoming of design. Nothing that mission critical should be so susceptible to damage. Is that really the case with the X32 faders?
I can't imagine that it's the source of the issues. I've occasionally had my hand or finger in the path of a fader as I switched layers and it's not caused a fader to fail. Scott's statement
"I would firmly chalk all three of your failures up to Operator Error" is extreme speculation.