Iteration 90 — H-046 RW EXCLUDED as an Instrument KILL #29 · THE BACKBONE STANDS · PIPELINE PROPOSAL FILED

In plain words: a kill that must not be misread. As a feature-RANKING instrument, the stepdown's per-feature score died at the dial law: its adjusted significance levels take only thirty distinct values (a consequence of the resampling count), and a coarse, steppy score inevitably reshuffles its ranking when the data volume changes slightly (80.3% agreement against the 90% bar). But the previous iteration's landmark result is untouched: as an ERROR-CONTROL engine, the procedure was flawless — zero false discoveries in forty-nine worlds where the standard method failed forty-three percent of the time. The resolution of this apparent tension is the iteration's contribution: the declaration layer doesn't need another ranking instrument — it needs a trustworthy inference backbone, and that is a PIPELINE decision, not a stack admission. A formal proposal now sits with the operator: adopt the rotation-based stepdown as the declaration pipeline's inference layer (consuming no gate slot), with the false-discovery backbone's re-entry and the wild-bootstrap gray-zone ruling folded into the same review.