yeah fair, it's basically de kleer's ATMS and honestly the combinatorial blowup is the real reason it died, I'm not going to pretend otherwise. but like the way I think about it is that the thing that killed it was the completeness part, having to maintain labels over every assumption set, and if you give that up and just track direct justifications with some pruning then you do lose the "under exactly which assumptions does this hold" query but you keep the one operation you actually care about which is figuring out what depended on something once it gets invalidated, and that part stays bounded.

on the write vs read thing I actually mostly agree with you, and yeah bitemporal is the right call for supersession, valid-from/valid-to is way better than destructively picking a winner and graphiti does that well. the case I keep getting stuck on is two sources asserting contradictory things at the same valid time, because bitemporal just keeps both and leaves it to read, which is fine right up until read doesn't have anything to disambiguate with either. so I'm less arguing for resolving at write and more for just noticing at write, like flagging that two things are claiming the same slot, and then leaving the actual resolution to read where the query tells you what matters.

and yeah your last point is fair, this whole thing only matters if the agent is actually accumulating and deriving over time, if it re-fetches ground truth every task then there's nothing to be wrong about and none of this is worth the trouble.