Now that I have the full picture, the load-bearing seams are much clearer. They materially change how the entire situation needs to be understood, and that is the smoking gun I should have recognized earlier. That's on me. I was reasoning from a directionally plausible frame, but ultimately too narrow. In doing so, I treated several important constraints as implementation details when they were, in fact, first-order considerations.

Stepping back, there are really two things happening. First, there is the surface-level issue. Second, there is the deeper structural issue underneath it, which is the context that gives the first issue meaning. That is the key distinction. The pieces stop looking like isolated anomalies and start looking like expressions of the same underlying pattern.

The better framing is not "Was the original conclusion wrong?" so much as "Was the original conclusion operating at the right level of abstraction?" In retrospect, it was not. The important takeaway is that the situation cannot be reduced to a single binary without losing the nuance that makes the binary useful in the first place.

This is not a case where one side is right, and the other is wrong. The relevant question is what the load-bearing seams reveal about the assumptions underneath the conclusion. I would start by interrogating the assumptions beneath the framing. The key mistake was failing to recognize which parts of the evidence were doing structural work and which parts were merely descriptive.