Two cheap measurements settled a question three expensive ones had not, and both
of them contradicted the diagnosis offered for it.
The stated diagnosis was that the identity's expressive range had become the
bottleneck. It has not. A census of the identities themselves — no GPU, seconds
to run — puts mean distance between twelve songs at 0.43 with no near-identical
pairs and full coverage of every decision space: six of six fills, five of five
lattices, six of six protagonist forms, three of three element scales. The songs
are handed genuinely different designs.
The decomposition then asked whether those designs reach the picture, by holding
the container fixed and varying only the identity, then the reverse:
identity only 0.0299
container only 0.0557
both 0.1101
neither 0.0000
Identity is worth 54% of what the container is worth, against an instrument
noise floor of exactly zero, and the two compose to more than their sum. The
inversion works at the frame level. What it does not do is replace the container.
That corrects EPIC-3 §5, which proposed a song picking two to five stages on the
theory that shared content would substitute for container variety. Container
variety is the larger of the two effects and identity adds to it. Four stages
with a rich identity throws away the 0.056 the library was already providing —
which is exactly the shape of every measurement in this epic: stages have the
lowest floor of any arm and no advantage in spread.
The direction is therefore not a small set of stages. It is the whole library
consuming the cast: keep the sixty-one containers and make them draw the song's
content rather than their own. The migration was filed as a cost; it is the
payoff.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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