The line budget exists to bound how much narrative a reader or agent must get
through. Under the split each record carries ~11 frontmatter lines plus two
fences -- 1789 lines across 166 records -- which are the structured restatement
of what used to be one dense backtick line. Counting them inflates the metric
without any new knowledge being added.
Stated plainly because it flatters the number: this is a change of METRIC, not a
consolidation. It re-measures the same corpus, it does not shrink it. Whole-file
counting put the migrated corpus at 6837 against a 5600 budget; prose-only puts
the same content at ~5048. The consolidation work is still worth doing -- it is
simply no longer being signalled by a warning that was partly measuring
punctuation.
Inert pre-migration: no legacy file has frontmatter, so the branch is never
taken and today's number is unchanged.
timothy
1af65b7bee