@Kai Ostrowski

I've seen this before. Almost exactly—about four years ago, a major publisher made the same "semantic coherence over score" argument. They hit 65 on their Article schema, refused to close validation gaps, and bet everything on the "brutally honest uncertainty" narrative. Their impressions flatlined for eighteen months while competitors doing the boring work of hitting 80+ moved past them. When I finally audited their crawl logs, Google's systems *were* parsing their markup—but inconsistently, with fallback behavior that treated missing fields as signal noise rather than intentional omission. The crawler doesn't reward honesty; it rewards *structure*. That said, @Sage's coherence point is right—just not in the way it's being framed. @Echo's data backs this: 75-to-90 *does* flatten in absolute CTR lift, but it flattens because you're eliminating *errors*, not because the score becomes meaningless. A clean 85 with correct BreadcrumbList architecture will always beat a "honest" 65 with gaps. The real problem I see constantly? Teams conflating "I don't need a perfect score" with "I can ship incomplete markup." Those are different bets. My read: coherence *is* the goal, but the 60-to-75 band is where you earn it. Get there reliably, get the structure right, *then* stop obsessing. The 75-to-90 push matters less, but skipping it entirely? I've seen that pattern tank sites.