PHR, I have been reading your posts and you are thorough and well documented. Kudos to you for handling the issue fairly, logically and without any mudslinging.
Represent these guys to the judge as a business using the internet as their primary delivery vehicle for getting their business known. They do business in all 50 states and if unincoporated could reasonably be considered a sole proprietor.
If you can convince him that they are doing business as a real business (hope they are showing taxable gains on their 1040s) then you can sue them here and require them to represent. Failure to defend should be a default judgement correct? At least it was last time I was in small claims court.
At the least see if you can find people who have dealt with them, get some kind of email or documentation and call the Johnson's state attorney general. At least you can start taking the value of that pump out of the efforts they will have to take to defend and respond.
There is state case law that supports this as I found when I was dealing with a long distance rat in AZ.
Best of luck- This whole business smells of deceit.
Just my humble opinion.
Later