Fetch candidate pages sequentially with the full remaining download budget instead of dividing a quick run's 500 KB equally across every URL. This avoids aborting otherwise readable pages at roughly 33 KB before claim extraction can inspect them.
Account for bytes consumed by failed downloads, preserve fetch errors in source responses, and fail runs with no successfully extracted document using an actionable error. Keep attempted sources on failed runs for diagnostics and cover the allocation and no-usable-source paths with regression tests.
Connect source-independence analysis and Stage 8 evidence scoring to the research orchestrator so completed runs retain a transparent score for every extracted claim. Forward those scores into Stage 9's evidence package, allowing synthesis to reason from actual provenance and exposing them through the research API.
Replace the previously technical-only synthesis fallback with the report contract consumed by the UI: a summary, source statistics, methodology, and provenance-preserving uncertain findings. Add regression coverage for score generation, score hand-off to Stage 9, report methodology, and visible fallback findings; record the healthy container deployment in the hand-off.
