Widening its waits earlier treated the symptom. It still failed about
one run in three, on an idle machine, taking eighteen seconds to do so
-- which was the clue: nothing was in flight to wait for.
SystemSettings verifies each write before storing it and serializes
overlapping ones, so the restore arriving while the previous batch was
still settling was being dropped outright. Waiting longer for a write
that was never queued cannot help. It is issued up to three times now,
and the run where a retry fires visibly takes eight seconds instead of
two.
Retrying cannot hide a broken write path: with the write stubbed out the
contract still reports exactly which policy failed to reach the
compositor.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BRvzt4H8XXLPVH5MyYdk9L
Gabriel Brown
a412e3d894