FWIW, while most of your comments on this post leave me with a sense that you have useful information to share, I've also found them somewhat frustrating, in that I really struggle to figure out exactly what it is.

Since I'm trying to rapidly summarize a segment of what Robert Fritz took a couple of books to get across to me ("The Path of Least Resistance" and "Creating"), inferential distance is likely a factor.

It's mostly his model of decisionmaking and commitment that I'm describing, with a few added twists of mine regarding the ranking bit, and the "worst that could happen" part, as well as links from it to the System 1/2 model. (And of course I've been talking about Fritz's idea of the ideal-belief-reality-conflict in other threads, and that relates here as well.)