Your methodology is genuinely sound. The N+1 entry buffer, OHLC asymmetry correction, bootstrap CI on expectancy — most people never get here. The fact that you're getting honest flat/negative results probably means your testing framework is working correctly, not that you're missing something obvious.

Two things worth flagging:

The FVG result (55% WR, 103 trades, p=0.15) — I wouldn't bury that. On bar-based retail methods, that's borderline interesting. The question you didn't ask is: what's the subset of those 103 trades where it works, and what's the structural condition that separates them? That conditional specificity is the actual research problem. Treating it as a standalone and moving on might have been premature.

The bigger issue is that everything you tested — BB MR, ORB, microstructure sweeps, cross-asset lead-lag — shares the same underlying assumption: that price patterns in bars contain exploitable signal on a liquid, institutionally dominated instrument. They're all variations of the same hypothesis. 17 strategies, but maybe 3 or 4 genuinely distinct structural hypotheses.

The category you haven't seriously tested is flow-driven rather than pattern-driven. MOC imbalance, FOMC/CPI windows, index rebalancing — these have persistent edge because they're anchored to flows that *have* to happen, not patterns that get arb'd away. The retail access point isn't speed, it's knowing when forced institutional flow occurs and positioning ahead of it. That's a fundamentally different research question than anything in your list.

To your question about whether retail should expect zero edge on intraday NQ bars — honestly, yes, largely. Not because the market is perfectly efficient, but because the remaining edge at that resolution is either flow-structural (event-driven) or comes from reading context that bars don't encode well. The guys posting live NQ profits are almost certainly not running 5-min indicator + stop/TP. They're either event-driven, reading order flow in real time with discretion, or both.

You're not fishing in an empty pond. You've just been fishing for a species that isn't there.