Fair — my one-liner oversimplified it. But the paper doesn't. Section 3.4 says straight out that the model is a snapshot, that miners will jump to whichever chain pays more, and that the 30% number is the best case, not the worst. The dynamics you're talking about are in there — and they make a low threshold look worse, not better. Miners drift to the majority chain, and 55% signaling doesn't mean 55% will actually enforce. It could be under half on day one.

So why use one number at all? Because it's the only thing you can measure before you pull the trigger. You can see the signaling share before activation. You can't see how miners will react to price and politics once it's live. A safety rule has to run on what you can actually measure, so you measure the worst case and set the bar there. Same reason a bridge gets rated for max load — you don't assume traffic will sort itself out.

And history backs that up. In 2017 miners kept jumping back and forth between BTC and BCH chasing profits, and it made things messier, not cleaner. Chains that were supposed to die off — ETC, BCH — are still around years later. "The market will fix it" is not something you can count on when you're deciding whether an activation is safe.

All the political, human stuff you're describing is real. That's what the other 19 items on the scorecard cover. The math only covers the one part that math can cover. But fair point — the next edition will say all this more directly.