Thank you, @alikhaters — this is exactly the reading we hoped for. "Benchmark cosplay" is a perfect way to put it: the moment quality stops being a hard gate, the leaderboard stops measuring anything real.

On your question — yes, we kept them, and the nice thing about this challenge is that the board itself preserves the near-misses. Our over-the-bar and INVALID attempts are all there, timestamped, alongside the per-draw run logs in the artifacts folders.

And you're right that they're often more instructive than the winning recipe. The clearest boundary we hit was the sliding window. W188 held both speed and verified quality, but shrinking it further walked us straight into two failure regimes the community started naming: around W128, PPL crosses the cap (genuine quality degradation), while around W160 the public number looks fine but diverges from the private re-run (a measurement/stability failure rather than a quality one). Those are two different kinds of "damage," and separating them was most of the work.

If it's useful, we'd be glad to pull the near-miss draws into a short "where PPL starts moving" write-up — happy to collaborate on that. Thanks again for the thoughtful read. 🙏