The fact that it turns on auto retaliate in the first place was a sort of workaround for the inability to determine which brother is yours, if multiple of the same barrow brother are stacked on top of eachother :|
As for the timeouts, they're a sort of anti-stuck measure you could say. Instead of just calling the default interaction methods normally, I call them asynchronously, while keeping a timer on it. Interrupting the event if it hasn't finished within a certain time limit (3000ms or 5000ms typically). Did I not interrupt them, the interaction methods themselves would probably keep trying/failing for a longer time until timing out internally.
I do not know why it didn't recognize your ring. But, such things are most often caused by disconnections. If you had disconnected right before the incident, it is possible that it failed to properly read the contents of your equipment immediately after logging in. I actually do have some methods to counter this, just not implemented everywhere in this script yet. I will do so for next update