the main issues is people fascination with Styrofoam..
That stuff is like what we in the military refer to as "ablative armor". Ablative armor is armor that sacrifices itself to take the hit, meaning that it takes a hit and is no longer as effective as it was beforehand.
When you put 20 pounds of iron in a box surrounded by Styrofoam, you may put it in tightly,but you can literally shake it back and forth really hard a few times and then check it and see that it is now "a little looser". This means that the next round of shaking the iron has further to travel and gain momentum, so it hits harder and becomes even looser, and so on.
Even if it cannot move to do this the process of stacking and packing poxes by the post office compresses the Styrofoam anyway... same results.
Styrofoam ONLY works when it is molded to the specific shape needed and really does require a packaging engineer to design it to work.
When I picked up the box the hole did not worry me, but the fact that i could feel the machine "mass" moving about an inch in any direction let me know i was more than likely going to see a damaged machine.