Creative Speculation

To my knowledge, no one has demonstrated that the Challenger "would" be destroyed as a result of the O-ring failure, or that the New Orleans levees "would" fail as a result of a Katrina-like hurricane. If someone is predisposed to interpret those investigations as attempts to cover up the likelihood of sabotage, nothing will prevent it. I'm half tempted to write those interpretations as an intellectual exercise, but I suspect that someone already did it seriously. (IPCC reports and associated scientific literature often are read in a similar crabbed way, which seems to obscure the actual strengths and weaknesses of the science.)

Honestly, it seems to me that the Truth Movement-inflected critiques of the NIST report have little to do with the NIST report, just as the heated critiques of the Edison/Mitofsky report had little to do with that report. They're rooted in special pleading. I'm not sure what discussion you had in mind when you wrote, "The entire point of this discussion, from the start, was to demonstrate (or fail to) that the collapse was inevitable without any help," but that's zackly what I'm talking about. That looks like reading the report first and foremost as an attempt to rebut one's preferred narrative, and responding with an attempted surrebuttal. Framing that as the "entire point" of a discussion is a formula for a useless discussion -- quite possibly worse than useless. If NIST had produced a report that was as obsessed with rebutting the Truth Movement as the Truth Movement has been obsessed with rebutting NIST, that focus surely would have detracted from other findings.