Shame after all that time taken but yeah sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and get someone to do it. At most I've seen a heat gun and sometimes WD-40 used on stuck parts but otherwise all you have is brute force
We actually did consider a heat gun but in the end we ran out of time. Plenty of WD-40 and other lubricants were tried too (I now have a lovely stain on my drive thanks to that one!). We even considered getting a dremmel and cutting the front pins out, but again it just came down to time.
