Hi,
On our changelog, you can find this improvement in the 4.6.1:
We changed the USPS shipping plugin's message when no shipping rates are available so that it can be modified with a translation override.
So yes, this was changed 2 months ago.
And thus they now use the translation key FAILED_TO_OBTAIN_SHIPPING_QUOTES which you can override as per:
www.hikashop.com/download/languages.html#modify
Regarding the avatar, I didn't had the time to look into it. I still have your email assigned to me. I'll look into it when I have time as it is not a priority and debugging kunena is a chore.