I'm not quite sure what you're saying, but I think I agree with this. I guess I'm trying to flesh out the idea of "some process we don't understand", since Robin's model seems to depend on it (as do things like Moore's law, which is more strongly supported by the data).

If we do assume universality, counterfactual resiliency is still a useful method of analysis, and we can even further clarify the reasons why by pointing out that models of universal behaviour usually involve the aggregation of many small, mostly independent effects. However, some evidence against counterfactual resilience is weakened. For example, we could take the counterfactual that the Greeks had an industrial revolution, but we might not actually know how plausible that is. Models like Robin's that conjecture universality would predict that there were reasons that that couldn't have happened, so we need to be more familiar with the data before a claimed instance of nonresilience can really be considered good evidence against the model. Thus, the idea of universality allows us to more accurately evaluate the strength of arguments of this sort.