If the parachutes had value to Earhart why did she not take them from Miami? Was it a concern about weight flying from South America to Africa? That does not seem likely as the distance from Hawaii to California was less.
The only reason that I can think of would be if the husband took it upon himself to send them to her and she did not want them in the first place. From what I understand she was very independent and if she did not like something she was not shy about letting you know. I could see her doing that if Putnam was taking some action that she did not approve of herself. If she was upset about them being sent perhaps that is why she immediately asked about them when they arrived.
It would seem that these would have historic value if they were indeed shipped back. It is would be amazing to me if the owner of the parachutes did not recognize that. That is an argument for them being on the plane.
On the flip side she wrote a telegram to the press while in Lae (search for Lae in Purdue collection) where she say that she has never traveled lighter. She mentions her luggage with some clothes and toothbrush and Noonan's lightly packed aluminum case that he picked up along the way. Perhaps she was a bit paranoid about the weight, rational or not.
As long as we are speculating, if she didn't have parachutes from the start, maybe she got scared on the long legs and then asked Putnam to ship chutes to her in Darwin in anticipation of the 6,500 miles of open ocean ahead of her between Lae and California. She obviously knew they were on the way since she asked about them when she landed in Darwin. It is pure speculation on your part that she was upset by their arrival since there is no mention of her being upset in Darwin by the arrival of the chutes. And there the parachutes are, piled up next to the plane, no reason to drag them out to the plane if she were shipping them back from Darwin.
As I pointed out at the beginning of this thread, neither Chater nor Collopy nor Balfour said that she left behind parachutes, life rafts, very pistols or other emergency equipment. Earhart herself cabled that she
repacked the plane and got rid of some "non-essential" stuff. If you think emergency equipment is "non-essential" when flying over 6,500 miles of ocean then you might also believe that she removed one of her engines too.

And don't think that she had no room for the chutes in the plane, remember the plane had
two more people and their stuff on board on the original flight from California to Hawaii.
Everyone was aware that this was the most dangerous part of the around the world flight, the most important segment for carrying emergency equipment. The
West Australian newspaper article said "as a safeguard against any emergency, they will be carried on the hazardous final stages of the flight across the Pacific to the United States."
Putnam wrote in the book published later that the chutes that had been carried all the way around the world were unloaded and shipped back from Darwin. How can that claim make any sense. It would be one thing if Earhart had decided to forgo having chutes at any time on the world flight but why would she carry them while flying over both land and ocean and then get rid of them just prior to the most hazardous leg? A more reasonable interpretation of the evidence is that when she started out she didn't think she wanted chutes along but changed her mind somewhere along the way, maybe Noonan demanded chutes and refused to go on unless she had chutes delivered to Darwin. But, if this were the case, she would have had to have made that call very early on since it would take a long time to ship the chutes out to Darwin. In fact, it makes much more sense that it was preplanned to have chutes for the the Pacific leg since it probably required more than a month to get the chutes from California to Darwin which means they had to have been shipped prior to Earhart leaving California on the second attempt.
gl
gl