It might be. I've "found" things that turned out to be super obvious or explainable with algebra and made myself look like an idiot in the past.
Some transparency from VQC would go a very long way right about now… hint hint
I didn't think it would be super useful to post what I'd been working on since none of it went anywhere, but I guess I might as well. We're meant to calculate the "value" at (e,1) where x=f-1. One specific value. There are several values, so who knows not only which value we're looking for but also why we're looking for it. So I thought I'd just generate some of these cells and see if any values stand out. e doesn't change, so it wouldn't be that. n will always be 1 at this cell, obviously, so it wouldn't be that. We know x is equal to the original f, so it wouldn't be that, since we wouldn't need to go to a new cell to figure that out. t is directly related to x, so it wouldn't be that either. So it's going to be something to do with d, a, b, c or f. I wouldn't think it would be f, since if we continually do this f becomes exponential, and that's the opposite of what we want (logarithmic). I can't see anything else about d, a, b or c that has any relevance to literally anything else, though. I have found that in quite a few test cases, c'/a is a whole number. It isn't in every case, but it has been in most of my test cases. I don't think that's useful but I was blindly looking or something.
I was also thinking about diagonals again, while looking at this image >>6952 here. Maybe whatever diagonals we're looking for for whatever obscure reason we're looking for them have a gradient of 1/2, rather than being a direct 1:1 relationship between the change in e and the change in d. There are diagonals in this image but they're all across two down one.
Whoops, trip