> Keep reading to the end

I did. In particular I did not miss the whole preceding apparent horizon vs event horizon context of §VIII or the second half of the second column of p. 17, all of which conflicts with your:

It hasn't finished forming because as its gravitational
field increases its time distortion increases. Its
formation is "frozen in time" (actually just very very
slow), it is *never fully formed*.

How do you square the emphasized part with, "Once the trapped region is formed, continued collapse is inevitable"? You should also note that your picture in your paragraph starting "Infalling observers..." is very different than theirs.

And then this choice statement and your previous paragraph in mixed order:

> That was 37 years ago! We may have figured out one or two things about black holes since then

"Tell all physicists you don't read physics papers without saying you don't read physics papers..." [1]

I mean, did you even look at the range of dates in your One Good Paper's bibliography?

For starters, Ginzburg & Frolov was just a useful foundational paper (which I suspected you had never heard of) that shows that generically in curved spacetimes, different observers count different numbers of particles, and in particular one observer's vacuum can be another observer's cloud of electrons, positrons, and photons. This was a nice way of saying that your "relativity does not allow observers to disagree on observations of what" is just wrong.

I gave you a google scholar link to the 37 year old paper paper so that it would be clear anyone with a slightly different academic background (and I hoped you) that it's a foundational theory paper. Frolov is the well-known author of two standard textbooks on the physics of black holes (with Novokov and with Zelnikov), both of which deal with Frolov's 37-year-old paper in the context of evaporation and of different observers counting different particle numbers and how that an acceleration between past and future observers accounts for Hawking quanta. Both Frolov textbooks appear early on the first page of google scholar results.

(The 37-year-old concern is especially funny. Frolov's 21st century textbook, like practically all textbooks on gravitational phenomena and theory, even reference papers which are now more than a hundred years old, oh no! Choosing a recent GR textbook -- Carroll 2014 -- the author lists under Advanced General Relativity: Hawking & Ellis 1973, de Felice & Clarke 1990, Sachs & Wu 1977; and in the Graduate section: Wald 1984, MTW 1973, Weinberg 1972, ...)

> modern (2024-era) numerical methods

which are built to be compatible with ... what? Analytical and/or perturbation theory, right?

(BTW, Stark & Piran published their computer results in 1985: <https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.55...>. Again, can be found by placing sci-hub.se/ before that URL. That's 39 years ago! "We have performed an extensive series of tests [including] known perturbation solutions.")

One more kick at the ridiculous dead horse: at the bottom of p. 17 one finds, "We are not the first to propose a picture like the one presented throughout this section. As far back as theoriginal discovery of the Hawking effect, similar ideas were invoked in [4], and by various comments of [2, 3]". The dates of those are respectively 1974, 1975, and 1976. Oh no!

Could it be that among the "one or two things about black holes since then" that "We" may have "figured out" is that early theory papers (the 80s are not early) turn out to have good support in things like astrophysics, magnetohydrodynamics, gravitational wave observations, Hulse-Taylor / PSR J0737−3039 etc. etc.?

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[1] https://journals.aps.org/125years but uh oh that was 2018 and surely the list would be totally different now!