I speak from my experience on Olympia typewriters, and my engineers degree says the same: The most inner portion is not intended to recurve. Main springs wind in one direction, all the way. In this status, it's not usable. But fear not, you can rescue it. I rescued a main spring that had the inner connector broken off. Main springs (like all springs) tend to be very tough steel. You can simply break the faulty portion off. Then, you clamp the new end in grip pliers that double as a grip and a heat sink. A vice will do the same, but will be very finicky with the narrow curvature of the spring. Let that piece of the spring that you intend to bend into your new connector peek out of the pliers. Get a blow torch and heat that tiny piece to a bright red glow, then bend it one-third of the intended bend. Heat again, bend again, and once again. And now comes the most important part, the annealing: Take the spring out of the heat sink. Carefully apply heat to the new connector and the first tiny piece of the spring with your blow torch. You want to warm the connector, the bend and approximately 5mm or ¼ inch of the untouched spring. Don't allow it to glow. It may only make slight orange traces in the flame, but no more. Pull the flame away slowly, don't let it crash cool, don't blow on it, don't put it in water. Don't burn your fingers in the process. Your main spring is shorter now, but it will work just fine. Welcome to the world of typewriter blacksmiths.

In these cases there seems to be some sort of adaptive gating mechanism that disables the typical energy sinks in order to allow entropic disintegration->search->annealing to happen.