So the question is: Did DC try to claim their hits were retals? If not then they were probably just trying to grab Evo, and it should have been treated as such and retaled accordingly.

You are just playing with semantics at this point.

That quote just posted from Jax does not say that the hits were specifically retals in the strict sense of the concept. What he is explaining is essentially what I discussed above as what used to be commonplace.

Unless they were spending retal messages with the hits they should have been considered grabs.