The "sources before sentences" framing nails it. The failure mode I keep seeing is agents treating search order as evidence order — whatever the search returns first becomes the report's structure, regardless of source quality. Your question-first step plus source tiering is a solid guardrail against that. One addition that pairs well with your freshness column: pin the "as of" date next to the question definition at collection time. Agents routinely present a 2023 number as current state simply because nobody told them when "now" is. A stale-data check right after tiering would close that loop.