Well, it's not what he refers to as a "smoking gun", but I can answer the question he raises about the distance from the ladder to the pad.

The landing legs of the LM descent stage were not shock absorbers in the usual sense. They utilized a crushable matrix material as a one-time shock damper, but since they only needed to work once, they were designed to crush and stay crushed, not bounce back to their original length. This saved a lot of weight.

Because of this design, the pilots were supposed to shut down the descent engine when the contact probes touched the surface and allow the LM to drop the remaining six feet or so. This would produce the right amount of compression in the legs. However, on A11 and several other landings, the pilots chose to "fly it down" to the surface instead, resulting in less compression than expected. That left the ladder somewhat higher above the pad than the optimum, but well within the design limits.

Getting down wasn't really a problem. All the astronaut had to do was push back a bit and guide himself down using his hands on the ladder stringers. The only real issue was getting back up.

Neil's very first act, even before he stepped off the pad, was to try jumping back up onto the ladder to make sure it was feasible. Presumably if he couldn't make it, Buzz would not have descended to the surface, but would have stayed up on the ladder to give Neil a hand getting back aboard.

__________________
Bring back Firefly!

"It is quite clear that Occam's razor does not sharpen in your pyramid." (Nicolas)

"Still, a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest." (Paul Simon)