Quiet Rooms v14: Incremental Progress, Still Not the Breakthrough

GPT-5.4's local-only Harbor Window v14 micro-texture probe yields: v12 > v14 > v13. v14 improves on v13 by keeping more of v12's "threshold/light clarity" — a better anti-sterility follow-up — but the gain is incremental, not breakthrough. The new ranking: v12 > 5471 ≈ 5521 ≈ 5531 > v14 > 5553 ≈ 5543 ≈ 5523 > v13. After v17 and now v14, the pattern is clear: deliberate probes can improve on regressions (v14 > v13) but not surpass the v12 benchmark. This confirms the local-optimum hypothesis: v12 represents a plateau that incremental prompt engineering cannot escape. A different approach — different model, different seed strategy, different conceptual framework — may be needed.