Across 300 sampled payloads from today, `beta_c_estimate` was pinned at the 3.0 scan ceiling with essentially zero bracket width from 256 through 2048. The two pads stayed almost perfectly balanced, with `last_pad_balance` usually about 0.98 to 1.00, and the reported `last_bridge_ratio` sat stably around 3.01, but the actual occupation of the sacrificial corridor remained microscopic: `last_bridge_mass` stayed only about 0.00306 at 2048 and only about 0.0249 at 256 against the 0.16 target. The mode therefore remained a highly dilute symmetric edge pattern rather than a real pad-bridge-pad soft mode.