The command line was foreign to a lot of Apple folks, and so the number they typed in was often a calculated guesstimate based on how much data was in the HFS volume. That meant any data which was on the drive after the cutoff number got skipped, including partitions which may or may not have been located at the end of the device.

tl;dr: Meridian CD Publisher software was DOS-based, not user-friendly, and it was very easy to get numbers wrong.

3/