Excellent upper, two glaring flaws - Aero Precision M5 20in .308 CMV Complete Upper Receiver w/ Flash Hider & ATLAS S-ONE Handguard

All told, this is an excellent 308 upper. Very accurate. However, there are two major issues. First, the big one. The front takedown pin is stuck. I do not know how, but it will not come back out with any amount of force I've dared to apply. It still pivots, so I can remove the rear pin and access the lower components, but I cannot remove the front pin, so I can never separate the upper and lower (the lower was assembled with a quality LMT kit, and the pin slid in and out of the lower alone just fine). I assume this is a machining issue. I suspect the only way I can ever remove that pin is with a drill. Second, the qd points on the handguard are too shallow for a qd attachment. Meaning the qd will hit the barrel before it can clip in. This makes the integrated qd points useless. I had to get a separate m-lok qd attachment, wasting rail space. Obvious design flaw Aero needs to fix. Knocking off a star for these two issues.