Had a MEC dude come up and chat before heading back from their last big meeting in ORD a month or two ago. At the end of a pleasant 10 min convo about how things were going I politely asked, “As a guy sitting right at the bottom 10% of the list: please don’t give up anything on scope.”

He said, for what it’s worth, that the direction given to the negotiating committee on the subject was clear: it was simply non-negotiable.