I stand technically corrected.
As for Mr. Tom, coffee is drink-wanted, yours sincerely.
I understand your confusion over ‘the clip came off’ sentence. I think in that guide they really emphasize the fact that が indicates an option, in the sense of it indicating the answer to who/what/etc questions. It throws you a bit when they then use this sentence as an example.
But it is also just a generic subject marker. You wouldn’t use を here, because you’re not doing something to the clip (it isn’t the direct object). The topic of conversation has presumably already been established, so there would be no need to re-introduce it with は. So if you want to explicitly name the clip when saying it came off, you would use が. It is the subject of the sentence.
I’m only really an advanced beginner though, so that could all be totally inaccurate 
But it would be like "The tip (is what came off). Doesn’t が mark new information?
No, the point of the post was not semantics, the point was to find out for myself if my translation would work.
You might have been being snarky but the “drink-wanted” part is actually really helpful. Is it really hard for most people to connect with literal translations like that? Because it makes it so much easier for me.
I would rather have a close translation that’s basically baby-talk than a translation that isn’t that close but sounds like proper English.
In fact I might make an entirely new thread about this.
I agree that it’s helpful because it shows you what role the word is actually playing: in the case of ‘like’, I think it’s really important to understand that it’s an adjective in Japanese rather than a verb, and this is skimmed over in translations, usually, which in the long-run is unhelpful.
But certainly to begin with it’s not very helpful to have a literal translation, because unless you knew what was going on there you’d be thinking “what the hell does that mean?”. And the point of learning another language is to be able to express your meaning in that language: the meaning I want to convey is “I like coffee”. I don’t think “I want coffee, ok, that’s ‘coffee is liked’, ok, so コーヒーが好き”. I just go straight to the Japanese.
Edit: I really want to emphasize that I see the value in literal translations though. If you give a really loose translation it can be almost completely unhelpful, because there’s no way to work out which bits comes from which parts of the original sentence.
It might be helpful for complete beginners, it would help them get a grasp on how Japanese actually works as opposed to what most translations say.
See my edit - personally I think that providing alongside each other is the best approach (because you want the beginner to understand the meaning, but you do also need them to understand where that meaning is coming from.
I’ve seen some resources gradually move throughout the text from ‘very literal’ to ‘appropriate meaning’ for their examples sentence translations, and I think it’s very effective, but I already understood the concepts when I was reading them so I’m unsure how a complete beginner would find it.
I did not intend to be too snarky though 
side by side translations would be ideal. I haven’t really seen anything that does quite that though. A literal translation dictionary or something would be really cool
Guys, seriously, is someone going to get Tom his drink-wanted coffee or not?
As long as a textbook explains what Japanese grammar means in the context of Japanese grammar, I don’t see the need for garbled English to go with it. Occasionally people are going to therefore run into sentences in their translated anime or manga episodes that confuse them as to how it went from the Japanese they heard or read to the English that was used, but that’s just how it is. A textbook is spelling the grammar out for you so that doesn’t happen.
Accepting the garbled English will make it easier to understand in the long run.
While I agree that an unnatural but case-focused grammar helps in the short-term, it becomes not useful after a while simply because your brain is supposed to already understand it quite well. No need for translations at that point.
Also, I find that translating specific parts of the grammar point we’re learning in a more simplistic way does help with understanding it. However, translating every simple grammar aspect just for the sake of it just adds caos to the translation and to your understanding of what you’re specifically learning.
I don’t think garbled English is that useful, but when introducing a new grammar point I can see the value in pointing out the literal translation. So for 好き I would explain that it isn’t a verb as in English, and for the first example sentence would include the point “literally this translates to ‘As for me, coffee is liked’”, for those who find it helpful. But once the grammatical difference is grasped, what’s important is the meaning.
Language cannot always be mapped word for word.
In fact, thinking about the ‘drink-wanted’ point - do you really find that any more helpful than ‘want to drink’? Because I really don’t. But I do find it helpful to know that the たい modifier is technically an adjective, because then it helps me to understand/remember that it conjugates like an い-adjective.
So for me, understanding the grammatical comparisons is more important than garbled translations. Being able to see which words directly relate between the English and Japanese is useful though.
Yeah drink-wanted makes perfect sense to me, as weird as that sounds.