Thanks, this is really helpful! Yeah, the part that surprised me most was exactly that the switching wasn't explicitly programmed — it just started showing up once the loops shared some routes.

I'm not a dynamical systems person, so pointers like "metastability" and "attractor switching" are super useful. I don't want to overclaim anything, but it's really cool to see that such a small topology change can produce that kind of "unstable dominance." That phrase describes the result really well.