X5: dissimilar+slope with A reaches 2859+2545 = 5404 over both sets, the best total this line has measured (was 5511; Chandrupatla 5228) - but again by trading the canonical set (2726 -> 2859) for the wide brackets (2785 -> 2545). The one-step replay (APS no harm) did not carry over: its bracket-halving metric rewards overshooting the root, which on a simple root costs superlinear convergence in the full run - the declared one-step limitation, now measured. Among the nine functions A helps only the tent (6026 -> 5892) and slightly ratio_soft.
Also: pin 'strictly fewer evaluations on every flat problem' was wrong for 6(x-2)^5 on [0,10] - both runs are budget-bound (90 of the guaranteed 91); corrected to the measured claim. verify_article 286/286, 836 tests pass twice.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
