Below are a couple pics of what the problem was:
I've no personal experience with this. My MES 30 Gen 1 worked well right out of the box. If there was an extra piece of metal that was part of the design of the 311 smoker. I looked at a video of that smoker and I didn't see it. You've got that model so your advice has factual credibility. I can only go by what I see inside my smoker.
Here you can see the extra piece of metal that was in the original 311 Gen #1 (where the arrow is):
Here you can see what the guys who didn't get the retro-fix did to fix their own Gen #1.
They just cut the extra piece of metal out:
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