This is a great essay! I was thinking that in investment research, I did the same thing but at the beginning I’d have three parallel frames (for base case, bull case, and bear case), and then gradually during the elaboration phase, I’d mentally put the data into those buckets. Depending on which bucket had the most stuff, I would get a rough idea of how much I liked the company.
Edit: Hmm. Now that I think about it more, one of the big differences in analyst quality was that the good ones were able to do this. The bad ones could only do one frame at a time. The average ones could do bull case + base case, or base case + bear case.