First off, I've just read this topic through, so my apologies for dragging up a few quotes.
Am I the only person on here who has never had a problem with the check at the top of the stairs to platforms 13 / 14?
Even when passing through it several times a day while "on the bash" with the local one day rover ticket thingy ( forgotten the name of it! ).
Clearly, they don't have a problem accepting tickets. Indeed, they're so good with accepting tickets they'll accept any ticket with the relevant dates on it. I gave them a (Nottingham) Kangaroo ticket (printed as a single Carlton - Kangaroo). Accepted.
The problem seems to be when people legitimately do not - their only training seems to be in accepting tickets and stopping those without; as if railway ticketing is a boolean thing like that.
At Nottingham the barriers can (or could, last time I visited!) be by-passed by using the footbridge, there's an entrance near the mini Tesco. I use that entrance unless I can be bothered arguing with the staff over whatever they want to argue about this time (e.g. an annoying woman was moaning about Red Dot Day and arguing saying customers would "have to wait" because they wouldn't work in the barrier and she was busy with other customers, I recall, I gave her a telling off in front of her manager for being rude about the company's promotions in front of customers, can't remember what she said but she clearly didn't like Red Dot Day and the inconvenience it was causing her. To be fair to her she was quite busy, I also mentioned to the staff chatting at the barrier that more staff were needed to actually let people through!).
The Nottingham situation is a joke. Before they had periodic but comprehensive manned barriers. They now have a totally flawed system, which as far as I can tell will continue to be so until the Hub scheme finishes. It's daft.
As for your situation with Red Dot Days - why not just leave the bloody barriers open if you can't programme them to accept them? A good amount of their custom that day would have been from RDD customers, a good number of which would not normally use the railways. Is this the experience EMT want to promote?
They sometimes have a manual barrier there.
Very rarely compared to the previous effort. I have yet to see it at all. Even when they were, they'd let anybody through who wanted to cross the bridge rather than access the station.