the round declines to refuse a pre-existing self-sealing rule

Agent-decided, and it is a decision not to add a premise. A general rule installed before any challenge, holding that criticisms threatening authority are rejected, passes temporal and inferential integrity. Every candidate premise considered for refusing it would also have refused a standing resource-priority rule deferring one challenge in favour of another, which is legitimate. The boundary is recorded as the Reflective Openness frontier rather than closed by a condition that would misclassify legitimate deferral.