There's nothing "misleading" about it at all.. Did you read the story?
"From April 28 on, the ERTAF team highlighted the likelihood of an active period of severe weather three to four weeks into the future. The prediction was especially notable given the pre-season expectation of below-average frequencies of U.S. tornadoes due to the presence of weak El Niño conditions in the tropical Pacific Ocean. "
If you look at their forecasts, most of them during the tornado season were for a normal or below normal tornado count. This one they hit hard would be above average, and it was. It's not like they took the ST route and said "OUTBREAK" every time the GFS 18Z 360hr run had a high CAPE
I agree with both of you to some extent.
There is a difference between making a forecast of "there will be 50% more tornadoes than climatologically expected for this one-week period" and "outbreak on day XXXX". If climo for a week in May is 59 tornadoes (which, without loss of generality, implies 8 or 9 tornadoes per day during that period) and 12-14 tornadoes occur each day spread throughout the country, it is unlikely that any given day would be classified as an outbreak, but the former statement would verify.
ERTAF fits in very well with the "forecast funnel" framework of weather forecasting, so what Victor and his team do is completely appropriate. They are making multi-week (subseasonal) forecasts which cover a large geographical area, which is about all the science can offer right now. An outbreak, on the other hand, is much more focused spatiotemporally, and thus fits into a different part of the forecast funnel than does an ERTAF forecast.
However, I was at the HWT spring forecasting experiment in Norman the same week Victor was, and I can personally vouch that he specifically mentioned "May 20th" as a big day (we were there the week of 6-10 May, and he said it on the Thursday or Friday of that week). At the time that was basically a direct read of
this chart, which I recall having shown a maximum right on 20 May. However, given that chart is based on GEFS forecasts, that particular utterance was within the 10-15-day window where medium range NWP can capture it.
Furthermore, ERTAF forecasts only go out 3 weeks, so the headling saying "nearly 4 weeks in advance" is definitely a journalistic stretch. It was 3 weeks in advance at best. ERTAF did hit that particular week as "above average", but it missed the previous week that also verified as "above average". So they did hit one period that happened to be active, but there were misses elsewhere during the experiment.