Eh, companies can say they are privacy focused just as apple does, but at the end of the day -
Protonmail has been subjected to swiss subpoenas, and apple recently gave icloud backups to the FBI for someone who was selling adderall, which in turn gave them access to the person's imessage/photos.
Granted, imessage is "end to end" encrypted, but this ends when you back it up on icloud. iCloud now has the private keys to this encryption, and the way they give access to the history of chats to your new imessage devices is by giving this key to all the other devices.
What this means is when you are having a conversation, it is (you), your ipad, your macbook, and the other person and their devices. The scary part is - it could be you, your mac/ipad/idevice + alphabet boys spying on you. Cloud shit is another death to privacy.
Do not believe their lies. Sorry for the rant, I can go all day.
In terms of who do I trust more, PVPN or Mullvad, I choose Mullvad. At the end of the day though, as I've mentioned before, it does not matter who your VPN provider is, but who owns those routes you are going through. The VPN company may not log you, but they can.
As for this dud, I can't really comment. I know Modalert is supposedly the "best" out of all the Modafinil brands, as you said, Sun is considered reliable.
If you want to go down the rabbit hole and figure out if there are actual duds or its just you, yeah, it's gonna take a few strips and all to get tested. Not sure if
@janoshik would like to chime in and perhaps tell us if there has been any Modalerts inconsistencies.