No, no, I just meant it’s one small example, that’s all. (But a memorable one!)
Anyway, I think I agree with everything you’re saying. You’re right that sometimes zooming out can lead you astray. But it’s funny, I remember watching Coco and knowing within about 20 minutes that the Concerns were bottom-right. There’s absolutely no way I would EVER have put it top-left, but not because of any logical reason about source of conflict; I just knew it had to be bottom-right because of how it felt. (I almost got the whole storyform right, but put the OS in Conceiving instead of Learning.)
This may be a bit controversial… but you know whole “fire causes smoke” analogy, where the source of conflict (e.g. Present) is the fire, and the conflict is the smoke? It’s a great analogy, but I don’t think we take it far enough. I think the fire has a certain character to it, imbued by the type of wood, etc., and you can smell that on the smoke. So you might be able to make some reasonable argument about why the smoke came from Past-fire, but you just know it can’t be Past-fire because it smells like Present-fire.
However, it’s damn near impossible to communicate “smell” over the internet so that’s not much use except on your own.