Well, Chris makes it sound like I would rather eat babies than quarantine a fish, which is not true.
I fully planned on quarantining the fish, however, I didn't want to copper right away, I wanted the fish to get settled in and eating before I medicated. The achilles it came in with had a really bad case of ich which I saw when I was acclimating, so I made a quick decision to place the goldflake in the sump of my main tank instead of into QT. I still think that was a better idea than taking a very small fish, before it was even eating and still totally stressed from being shipped all over, and immediately treating with copper.
IDEALLY, I would have had two quarantine tanks up and running but I didn't, since I wasn't aware it would work out like this.
Anyway, long story short, I did make some mistakes down the line and I admit that. I do not think the emperor had anything to do with the gold flake dying though, I never once saw even the slightest bit of aggression towards the gold flake. They used to swim together, the gold flake would follow the emperor around and vice versa, there was never even a fin flare that I saw. The goldflake had the whole back of the tank to himself, the rock work is such that a small fish can go back into a lot of caves and hidey holes but nothing big can fit in, so he wasnt being picked on at all. The only aggression I ever saw was from the achilles and you can clearly see in the couple videos I posted that the gold flake wasnt suffering from it. I really dont blame other fish as a cause of death or even stress.
If I could go back and do it all again, I'd simply have set up two QT tanks before the fish arrived and hopefully things would have been different.