Agreed, there is no fundamental distinction. You can certainly update existing probabilities which did not take into account Occam's Razor, to take it into account. What makes Occam pertinent to priors in particular is that you can apply it to anything, which means it can always also be the first thing you apply to hypotheses. So think of Occam as 'evidence' that applies to all hypotheses. (note that the conjunction rule is not similarly 'evidence')
Yes it is ideally redundant, but i did emphasize I was suggesting it as a working rule. It seems to me less computationally expensive to remove extraneous elements from hypotheses than to calculate or at least rank their complexity.
Link.
"Razib Khan has an academic background in the biological sciences, and has worked for many years in software. He is an Unz Foundation Junior Fellow. He lives in the western United States."
Razib's writings can be found on his blog, Gene Expression.