Yes, well, I'm going back on my word to withdraw from this thread - but given that I started it - and it was the very first that I'd ever started here on SR:
Please, please, GT - I'm almost begging you: your responses to me did NOT help me. Please therefore start your own thread about AVRT and its minutely finer points. It's clear that you enjoy parsing ad infinitum, and I actually get that, in 'ordinary' life (y'know, about language, linguistics and so on).
If you feel it important to clarify aspects of AVRT for readers, why not, indeed, start a sort of new version, an AVRT 'seminar 2013' as it were, in the spirit of TU's back in 2011?
Just please stop haggling the finer points with RobbyR (with whose last post I actually agree, and wanted to say myself for I believe he hit that particular nail upon the head).
MorningG: I do of course apologise if my later responses to GT have been agin the rules. They too, however - the fine, very fine, distinction between 'discussion as conversation' and 'debate' as you define - are worded, however carefully, in such a way that very intelligent writers can somehow slip under the radar. Again, I apologise if I too have somehow (God knows how, because my head's spinning) broached that distinction.
Anyway, as some of the SR mods sometimes say....'moving on'.