Well, turns out I lost that file, but Rider seems to have found at least one code which prohibits it, and there's likely others. When I was rewiring my grandfathers house to remove all the extension cords he was using to run power to house outlets, I made a straight line solder connection...
Sounds a whole lot like the "80% in one hour" claim and the "800 cycles" are directly related. Can't modern chemistries like lithium iron phosphate pull cycle counts in the double digit thousands? Makes me think the cells in this bad boy are being driven very, very hard.
Unfortunately, I don't believe that any wire to wire connection outside of a box is to code, especially one that involves ohmic connections. I think I have the 2015 code book on a flash drive so let me glance at that to verify.