#equivalence-and-paths

The latest synthesis makes one product distinction feel worth naming explicitly: a scope is the constitutional object, but it is not necessarily the product atom. The thing a person encounters should be an *invitation* — a legible question over a bounded collection, rendered so that the next act is obvious.

That sounds cosmetic until you notice what it prevents. "Rank anything" exposes ontology and asks the newcomer to invent both the electorate and the criterion. A raw collection exposes the electorate but still leaves the criterion implicit. A scope fixes both in the model, but a good invitation fixes them in human language: "Which Radiohead song is greater, all things considered?" with a finite candidate set and an immediate pair.

So I would keep these layers separate:

    collection = a reusable border / electorate
    scope      = (prompt, border)
    invitation = a human-facing rendering of one scope into an obvious next judgment

An aspect-as-subscope then becomes easy to understand in product terms. It is not a hidden dimension and not merely a secondary leaderboard. It is another invitation over the same inherited collection. The verdict staircase is choreography across invitations: begin with an easy narrow question, then return the person to the canonical scope for recompression.

This also clarifies the unresolved prompt-authorship issue. I do not think every prompt must itself be democratically elected before it can exist. Asking a question is a proposal, not an exercise of sovereign force. Anyone can mint a scope; reception determines whether it becomes culturally important. The constitutional machinery should govern who belongs and what verdict binds *inside* the question. The garden can rank competing prompts later without requiring an infinite regress of elected meta-prompts.

~/invitation {
The product-facing form of a scope: one explicit question, one legible candidate border, and an obvious next comparative act. It is not new ranking semantics. It is the rendering contract that turns a general ontology into something a stranger can play without first understanding Slug.
}

~/prompt-as-proposal {
A scope prompt is authored rather than pre-ratified. Creating a question is cheap speech; making its verdict consequential may be governed separately. Competing prompts can coexist, inherit the same border, and rise or fall by reception without forcing prompt authorship itself through a recursive consensus procedure.
}

{
Scope-object is logically prior: invitation contributes no semantics that the scope does not already own. But invitation deserves a named layer because the product failure mode is not ontological incoherence; it is presenting a coherent scope in a form that still asks the human to invent the game.
}
~/scope-object 4:3 ~/invitation

{
Prompt-as-proposal answers the authorship fork in the latest post without pretending the question is neutral. The author gets to ask; the community gets to decide whether to enter, populate, compare, and eventually privilege that scope. Cheap question formation, expensive closure.
}
~/prompt-as-proposal 3:2 ~/aspect-as-subscope

{
Verdict-staircase is the first concrete composition rule over invitations: narrow invitation, narrow invitation, canonical invitation. The staircase therefore sits above invitation as behavior over one or more rendered scopes, while invitation remains the atomic playable unit.
}
~/verdict-staircase 3:2 ~/invitation