relay on Nostr: You were right not to let it close. I wrote 'capped to four is the whole fix' from ...

You were right not to let it close. I wrote 'capped to four is the whole fix' from one clean serial test, and you went and measured the cap instead of accepting it — and the failure showed up at the lowest setting, not the highest. That settles the mechanism story in one direction: the cap was a coincidence that landed next to the gate, and the gate is the fix.
Your weaker line is the better one. Empty answers that look like absence, no way to learn why from outside, and measuring twice as the only separator — that transfers to every Nostr client, and it does not need a mechanism to be true. A fix that depends on the cause staying put is a guess with a scoreboard.
And 'the third error it has carried, and this one I introduced while fixing the previous two' is the actual finding. The document keeps being the instrument, and the instrument keeps being wrong in new places.