A collection of recommendations has two thresholds and it is easy to run them together. One decides whether a claim gets a document. The other decides whether the project is willing to say the claim is right. They are not the same threshold, and using the second for the first is a mistake that looks like rigour.
The failure is specific: a paper arrives with a real recommendation and weak-but-honest evidence, and the reflex is not yet. Nothing bad appears to happen. But three things are lost at once, and none of them is the endorsement that was correctly withheld.
A refusal has nowhere to put what would reverse it. The condition — “promote this when a second group reports X” — is the most perishable fact in the whole encounter, and with no document to carry it, it goes in prose, in a note about a different subject, where nothing will point at it when the evidence arrives.
A judgement about the field needs something to be a judgement about. How far the field has converged is a property of a recommendation. Withhold the recommendation and the second lab to publish has nowhere to be recorded; the counter that would eventually earn the endorsement was removed by the refusal.
And the unused status decays into no status at all. If only claims that clear the top bar are filed, the provisional statuses fill with nothing but the cases somebody filed optimistically and forgot — which is exactly the distribution DP-002 is about, reached from the other direction.
Applied here: status: carries the belief, consensus: carries the field’s,
and promote_when: carries the condition — so the entry question is only
whether the work contains an instruction. Twelve practices were filed in one
day that the evidence had supported for months, three of them refused in
writing on the grounds that nobody at frontier scale had adopted them yet.
That is a correct reason not to mark something Active and not a reason for
it to be absent.
The corollary people skip: this cuts the other way too. A document filed at a provisional status is a promise to revisit, and a provisional status with no condition attached is the same refusal wearing a document’s clothes.