Glad things are fixed.

Bridge will often get twisted like that because maya cannot really know how you want the edges to be bridged. What maya does is orders each edge in a selection and then bridges the edges in between two selection according to each selections edge ordering.

So if the lowest order edge in selection 2 does not match the lowest order edge in selection 1 then the edges will appear twisted. The bridge offset shifts the ordering of the second selection.

The thing is you cannot always predict how the edges are going to be ordered and so it's hard to predict what offset value (if any) will be required to get the correct bridging order. That is why it is almost impossible for a tutorial to tell you an absolute value to enter for the offset in advance (as in your tutorial).

So is not really a bug that you have to enter a value different then what your tutorial says to use. You just need to scrub through values to find the bridge offset that works.