I wrote that because I was getting the infinite loop issue when pulling a Spriter project into Unity 5.1.1. Simply force-quitting the app and restarting is not a viable solution, so this alleviates the issue.
The check for the "spriter" path is simply a way to control what is set to a Sprite, as opposed to another texture type, since the game we are making will use many types.
Currently, I am trying to figure out why an update to the SCML file was not represented in Unity, even after re-importing the SCML file. Taking the prescribed steps (deleting the prefab and controller and reimporting) resolved the issue, but that's a non-starter for a game in full production: that destroys prefab links in the inspector, and destroys all work done with state machines in the animator. However, the issue only occurred once: I could not reproduce it, and otherwise it worked fine. So that's a bit scary... it would be better if I could repro and fix it. Work continues!