Retain foliage while refining the tips
Source dev.17 introduced persistent curved secondary branches and varied juniper sprays. Dev.18 adds tip pinching: select new wood, preview with K, and confirm with Enter. Finished foliage stays while up to two retained buds can develop shorter shoots, funded by the ordinary resource model.
Watch the tree across more than one pass
A matched eleven-day accelerated study compares heading cuts with pinching. The captured pinched tree retains a fuller crown, but convincing mature canopy pads remain unfinished. The source includes a wire-removal reload correction; the latest exported standalone package is still dev.16.
Thickness does not produce age on its own
A separate 130-day accelerated development and cutback experiment thickened the original trunk to about 17.2 mm. It also nearly erased the nursery taper because added wood is distributed too uniformly along the original support. Smooth bark, missing deadwood and coarse local allocation prevent the result from resembling an aged specimen. Accelerated test days are not real cultivation years.
What I learned
Adding wood is different from developing an aged form. The next useful model needs to preserve local taper and account for where a branch supports growth, rather than treating a larger diameter as the finish line.
Sources & development context
House of Bonsai README; docs/ORGANIC-BRANCHING.md, CANOPY-REFINEMENT.md and THICK-TRUNK-STUDY.md, source dev.18. Retained September 13 canopy-refinement-pinch-front.png and measured aged-trunk study. Reported measurements are from the saved experiments; this publication does not rerun growth validation.