Research velocity is rising, but the gates are doing what we expected

The latest run of Hadto’s ontology evolution loop produced two signals at once.

CQ coverage remains near maximum at 99.8%, and discovery-backed questions are still growing across multiple verticals. The dental vertical added new research contexts around manual intervention escalation and payer policy bulletins. Home services, professional services, and franchise operations also showed CQ growth.

Research velocity is up.

Why the queue can look stalled

The same cycle produced almost no accepted maintenance proposals. The delta counters are clear:

• dental cycle: 2 new CQs, 0 proposals generated
• maintenance generation: accepted 0 proposals, 3 rejected via invalid_answer_path
• research discovery: accepted 2 proposals, 0 rejections there

So the platform is still finding grounded discovery work. The bottleneck is downstream: maintenance-mode proposal attempts are failing answer-path checks.

That is expected behavior. Ontology work should not advance just because a proposal exists. If the answer path is missing, fragmented, or inconsistent with the proposed edit, the system should block it before it moves further.

What the run says about the system

Two trends are now visible:

1. Research pressure is expanding across four verticals.
2. Governance is acting as the bottleneck by design.

That can look like lost throughput if the only headline is proposal volume. In practice, rejected proposals are doing useful work. They are preventing ontology debt from being promoted into the platform.

The governance implication

The right metric here is not proposal quantity alone. It is proposal readiness.

The pattern is straightforward:

• shipping maintenance candidates with explicit, machine-checkable answer mapping,
• separating proposal-generation filters from proposal-readiness checks,
• documenting exactly why an answer path failed,
• making those failures visible enough that authors can repair them before rerun.

The goal is not fewer gates. It is gates that enforce quality while making readiness easier to achieve.

What follows from this

This run also reinforces other ontology-quality work already on the table:

• ONT-006 and ONT-007 remain open reminders that logical consistency is not the same as ontological soundness,
• RBox and taxonomy governance belong in the same readiness story as answer-path validation,
• any future scaling plan should treat these checks as standard preconditions for cross-vertical rollout.

The pipeline is not stuck. It is showing that discovery can rise while governance keeps weak maintenance edits from slipping through.

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Source evidence used in this note: Keet Chapter 5 study tracker (2026-03-31-keet-ontology-engineering-progress-tracker.md), the daily research report (evolution/daily_report.md), delta stats (evolution/delta_report.json), and open governance issues ONT-007/ONT-006 context.