Team thylinao entered the Open and Strict tracks of the BAREC 2026 shared task on sentence-level Arabic readability with a deliberately plain system: a fourteen-member equal-weight ensemble of encoder fine-tunes, decoded to the 19-level scale by cutpoints interpolated halfway between validation-tuned thresholds and thresholds that match the blind score distribution to the training label prior. It scored 85.3 QWK on both tracks, first on both. This paper is about how those choices were measured. Three independent estimates place the noise floor of our offline evaluation between 0.09 and 0.44 QWK, as large as the margins that decided the final ranking. In three paired comparisons against the live board, only the smallest of the three offline estimates survived; the other two reversed in sign. We therefore proved that the Open and Strict tracks score identical gold, and made every decision worth a submission from a live board reading. Once the board showed the mean was capped, every candidate we probed came back a tie, bar one that we later withdrew as outside the rules. The full ledger, including four refuted hypotheses, is in the appendix.