Sorry; maybe I'm too stupid or lazy, but I genuinely don't get your point. Is it just that when they construct the tree in "Inferring", it looks qualitatively surprising (non-modal) given any single introduction, assuming (as I do as well) that A predates B? But we've known that for literally years now. As I understand the paper, their novel contribution is to quantify how surprising that looks, whether it's p ~ 20% surprising (which wouldn't mean much) or their claimed p ~ 0.5%. That's what they do in "Separate", and it correctly and inherently depends on the epidemiological modeling that I don't trust.

Again, in the Twitter thread that you yourself linked, Worobey says:

> This [the real polytomy structure] is something that [we] DO NOT see in ~99.5% of simulations. That is the crux of the paper.

The simulations in question are the epidemiological simulations from "Separate". You've told me to disregard Worobey's comments here; but while it's possible that Worobey has misunderstood the significance of his own paper, it seems more likely to me that you have.