In disclosure, I loved my genius bar job for most of the years I was there. It got to a point where the pay just didn't justify the bad hours, the work load, the physical discomfort, and the feeling like there was nothing else beyond the Genius Bar as an employee. I had a bad experience with pretty incompetent management trying to transfer from one store to another when I was moving with my wife and just generally ended up leaving Apple with a bad taste in my mouth. I felt if they couldn't really put out the effort to try to retain a quality employee like myself that I should just leave while I had the opportunity.
The store was starting to hire less quality techs so that they could pay them less and repair procedure was turning into "Run AST and follow the force-fed diagnostic steps and we'll tell you what to order for the repair". I just felt like being an expert wasn't needed anymore. Also the thought of having the terrible work hours then turn into either genius bar all day or overnight repairs just didn't sit well with me. The Genius Room was an escape for many of us at KoP. That store was awful. Loud, hot, crowded, and we got all the repair traffic from Christiana mall which really was only there as a tax haven for retail sales.
Kind of a long disclaimer. Anyway...
I did plenty of quick software fixes when I was at the genius bar. But typically in some scenario where severe software work was needed such as manually fixing corrupt mail databases or something with 3rd party software that we weren't familiar with or authorized to work with we would generally refer those out. We couldn't really justify just charging that flat software fix fee and assume that all their problems would go away. Maybe this was just due to the nature of how busy our store was, but I can't remember anyone on our team ever checking in anything for Software 1 or Software 2 repair. We had to crank out 400 repairs a week most of the time on a bench built for 3 techs. We had computers running diagnostics and checks on every horizontal surface we could find, two deep. iMac bezels and glass just everywhere you can imagine. If We had a computer on a bench for a day or two doing software repair.. well you get the idea. If we couldn't fix it during a Genius Bar appointment we would typically refer them to one-to-one if it were a training circumstance or an AASP if it was actual bonafide software repair or data recovery.
Things like an OS reinstall or a photo library repair was fine. We'd just set it up at the bar with a service ticket on it for tracking and have them hang out in the mall for an hour while we took other appointments. It wasn't atypical for me to be working with two bar appointments simultaneously while also tracking two or three software repair situations at the bar that didn't require constant attention.
Often it wasn't even a software fix, but something that was more appropriate with one to one. We had a lot of folks who used (and sometimes abused) the genius bar as 15 minute one to one sessions which was okay but sometimes had the possibility of creating log jams when those appointments went over the time limit.
We would occasionally help people into the store from the parking lot. But that's still a hassle as the person has to come into the store, find someone to help them, wait for someone to be available to step outside for the 10 minute track out to their car and back. It's still a pain and some people just don't want to deal with that.
As far as price and T4 repairs, almost any circumstance that we found liquid damage we would quote a T4 repair. You know just as well as I do that sometimes they can be fixed with a single part if you can clearly see where the liquid damage is. Sometimes it really is the keyboard, or just the MLB, but at KoP we would always just default to T4 repair. Maybe it was liability, thoroughness, who knows. But at the AASP I work in now It's nice when the circumstance comes up that I can save someone $1000 by just replacing the damaged topcase and not having to qualify it as a T4 repair.