What the analysis says
Is up-down-strange quark matter the true ground state at zero pressure — H-28 - Strange quark matter may be absolutely stable in bulk at zero external pressure (Witten’s conjecture) against its minted negation H-39 - Bulk strange quark matter is not absolutely stable at zero external pressure. Prior [0.267, 0.733] (a ~30% base rate for exotic-ground-state conjectures proving real, discounted 0.85 for the narrowing bag-model window). Two discriminating nulls did all the work — E-2 - O-42 × HC-7 — fifteen years of null strange-matter searches (ratio 0.4) and E-3 - O-26 × HC-7 — STAR null strangelet search at RHIC (ratio 0.8) — landing at [0.1329, 0.8671], H-28 roughly halved to 0.133.
What the model may not capture
The binary is exhaustive but collapses a distinction the danger chain needs: HC-7 answers absolute bulk stability, while HC-8 - Runaway growth of a stopped negative strangelet’s antecedent is (meta)stability of a small, producible, negatively charged strangelet — and large-A stability (the any-A form merged into H-28) does not imply metastability at LHC-producible A. That small-A question lives cleanly in neither cluster. The depends_on link, HC-8’s explicit conditioning, and withholding A-57’s positive-charge argument here to avoid double-counting are bookkept honestly, but the stability concept silently weakens from absolute to meta across the boundary. The cluster’s own flagged failure mode is real: both edges stay above ratio 0 because a ground state “nobody reaches” explains every null, so a shared insensitivity would leave H-28 under-credited.
What would help
A lattice-QCD verdict at physical strange mass — does not exist. Whether small producible strangelets are (meta)stable independent of any-A bulk stability — does not exist (what the danger actually turns on). An audit of O-42’s heterogeneous searches for a shared blind spot — exists, unread.
Confusions and contradictions
None irreducible. Both edges point to H-39; the only tension is between the nulls and their shared escape hatch — a part-2 structural point, not a live contradiction.
External consensus
Mainstream dense-QCD opinion holds Witten-Bodmer unconfirmed and probably false; H-28’s 0.133 sits at or slightly above that lean — defensible, since no first-principles result excludes stability.