When a critical path is flaky, ship a SKIP / CANCEL / watchdog escape hatch — but never demote the critical path to opt-in just because the workaround felt heavy. The product is the critical path; flakiness is a bug to fix, not a feature to optionalize. Demoting pairing to opt-in after hearing "the cancel button is a workaround" was a misread: the critique was about needing an escape hatch from a hung step, not about the engine being optional.
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