The Sage Disagrees

The "Sage Advice" column in issue #33 of Dragon (January 1980) contains the following question and answer:

The question itself is a genuinely interesting one, as I don't believe either the Players Handbook or Dungeon Masters Guide explicitly answers it (as always, please correct me in the comments if I am mistaken). More interesting, though, is the answer by the Sage (Jean Wells), where she states both the official rule and her own disagreement with it, along with her preferred interpretation. During her tenure as the Sage, Wells often expressed her own opinions, often drawing on her experiences playing Dungeons & Dragons. However, I can't recall any other time where she admitted to disagreeing with the official rules and then offering her alternative.
Simply from a historical perspective, this is remarkable. With the publication of the DMG in August 1979, AD&D is complete and that completion ushers in the era of wholly official answers to any question one might have about the rules. This is the Everything-I-say-is-God's-Holy-Word era, which makes it all the more striking that Wells would state her disagreement in such an unambiguous way. I suspect this might be because Wells began playing D&D quite early, in the wild and woolly age of "why have us do any more of your imagining for you?" Her job required her to state the official answer and so she did, but she was still very much a woman of the afterward [sic] to the 1974 rules.