As a follow-up, our appeal against the TfL fine has been upheld; in their representation TfL produced 4 pages of falsehoods and concocted rules (they spliced together partial rules to form new wordings) which the adjudicators describe as "verbiage" and which our representation took apart line-by-line.
The adjudicators finding includes the following statement:
Back to the topic of this thread - the risk is that (i) appointed upholders of the law can and will overstep the mark in attempting to implement an action, and (ii) it can take a lot of time and effort to ensure that an unjust charge is overturned.