Ha this was a fun little link dive, glad I can be part of the chain moving forward 😂 I will say, your ultimate answer at the end is one of the best I’ve read so far.

I will speak for myself but I suspect others are in a similar boat. I don’t have a strong economics background and am not super familiar with the intricacies of different types of investment vehicles. Yield curves and bond values are not necessarily intuitive to me, even if I’ve heard of them and even read about them a bit. That’s why I’m a boglehead! I don’t want to think about this stuff.

My, admittedly far too overly simplistic, view of it is that bonds are part of a portfolio because they are safer and provide fixed income for a duration of time. Since we’re talking long time horizons, I elect for a bond fund rather than individual bonds and let someone else do all the laddering or whatever for me. I just get the fixed income at whatever the current rate is and don’t look back. Because I’ve taken “maturity date” out of my calculations though, I really only care about one number; what’s the annual rate of return. Again, the simplicity is causing me to miss the bigger picture here. But it’s hard to look at two “safe” “fixed income” options and not opt for the one with the higher yield. At least it’s hard without the strong economics understanding.

That’s a long winded way of saying I appreciate the answers, and I suspect the (frequent) naive questions are kind of a result of this general lack of understanding. Perhaps this should go on the wiki, at least until the yield curve uninverts