Tablets vs Capsules

I don't entirely understand that, since (I think?) maltodextrin is formed while digesting starch. But maybe there are some ultra severe conditions.

You would be correct. Matodextrin is just hydrolyzed grain starch. When you eat grains, your body makes in in the GI tract through hydrolysis. It's extremely rare to have an issue. The vast majority of the people reporting issues are making it up in their heads because they read something online. Those same people are likely consuming orders of magnitude more matodextrin in other things they consume every day, and just don't know it. They read articles saying it's inflammatory, or that it affects gut microbiota, but then eat pasta and have it form in their stomachs naturally without any issues. They eat cereal, or pasta, or premade soups, or energy bars and get 100X more maltodextrin than in a supplement capsule. It's also absorbed as glucose. The idea that tons of people are having bad reactions to small amount of it in supplements is silly, but a lot of the fear spread on certain things is not based in factual science, but in emotional responses to perceptions of things.

I think you probably answered it tbh. I was trying to get good priors on capsules vs tablets, and I guess I felt your reply left me with "It just depends on the specific product", but I see you at least said "those pros and cons are a vast oversimplification" (not entirely false); so I guess I should just trust a competent and resource-full brand like ND. I am still left a bit wondering why Source Naturals does all tablets, but maybe I just have to ask them...

My formulation guys have been doing this for 30 years, so I heavily rely on their experience when deciding on a formula. They have ran all sorts of machines with thousands of ingredients, so they can usually just know what will work and what won't. Sometimes we have to find out the hard way, like recently happened with isoliquiritigenin. We had to completely scrap a whole run of isoliquiritigenin because the powder was acting differently than we had ever seen a powder act in a tablet press. As the tablet press vibrated, the isoliquiritigenin would separate from the binders in the funnel. This meant that as the run went on, the concentration of isoliquiritigenin in each tablet changed. We didn't catch it till we did our lab testing of the batch after pressing the tablets. We had to synthesize a whole new batch of isoliquiritigenin, and reformulate the mixture with carriers than prevented the separation. The thing is, only a company like us, with an in-house analytical lab testing in-process finished goods, would even catch this. Most brands would just sent the isoliquiritigenin to a contract manufacturer. They would formulate as normal, and then they would package the tablets right after production. Almost no contract manufacturers have in-house labs that do in-process assaying like we do, so they would have no idea that the tablets at the beginning of the run were low in isoliquiritigenin, and the ones at the end were high. Even the ones that do testing would only test a composite sample. When you composite a sample, you normalize out the variability in the tablets, so you wouldn't even catch it. We were assaying individual tablets at the start and end of the run, so we caught the issue. It really is not something any other brand would ever catch, which could explain why some people report variable effects from other brands. Maybe the bottle one person got was from the start of the tablet press run, so they didn't get much effects. Then another person got tablets from the end of the run, and they got super strong effects. Little did they know that the first person was getting a low dose and the second a high dose just because of the way the powder acted in the tablet press run. These are the sorts of things we deal with every single day, to ensure every dose of every product of ours has what we claim on the label It's a pain in the ass, to say the least. However, I personally take our supplements, and I know the stakes, so we do everything possible to ensure things are perfect every single time. To say it is uncommon in this industry is an understatement. Nobody else out there is doing things to the level we are, because it adds a TON of complexity and cost to the equation. But to me, accuracy and precision is worth the effort.