Hi Jenny: okay, now we're getting somewhere! But let me respond to your points in order...
"Forrest has said: They get progressively easier after you discover where the first clue is. So it would seem it should be your #2 reason that searchers aren’t moving past the first two clues."
Forrest has indeed said that, but you're a puzzle-designer. You know that what you think is easy can be extraordinarily hard for the would-be solver, and similarly things that you think are difficult may be more trivial than you might guess. As far as I know, Forrest has never designed a puzzle of this kind before, nor did he confide in anyone else in order to independently assess its solvability. So his assumptions about the relative difficulties of the clues may not be valid. The fact is, he doesn't know. Or more accurately, he can't know.
I think people expend a lot of energy pondering the semantics of "knowing" the answer to a clue vs. having a preponderance of evidence that supports a particular clue's solution. It's like establishing guilt or innocence in a jury trial. The jurors don't KNOW that someone is 100% guilty -- they weren't eyewitnesses. They reach a verdict based on witness testimony and other evidence presented, but always leaving some sliver of doubt, however small. As searchers, we're in the same boat. If a searcher won't put BOTG without "certainty" of at least the starting location, they will never put BOTG because that certainty can never come. So I don't think we should be concerned whether the early two-clue solvers KNEW they had solved them, because of course they didn't. But they were confident enough to make the trip, so I think it's unrealistic to believe they all simply got lucky. I'm confident at least some of them were there by design and very sure of themselves.
Regarding the Jennifer comment, I concede there is a chance he was being serious, or at least semi-serious. But in my triaging of his hundreds of statements, and comparing his answers to similar questions, I choose to allow this one to fall into the "not serious" basket. So I counter that searchers *depending* on the statement to be factual is potentially far more dangerous and limiting than simply ignoring it.
Now, to the meat of our exchange. It was not clear to me until your most recent message that you were considering the possibility that the mention of home of Brown in line 8 of the poem was possibly *foreshadowing* of things to come. THAT is perfectly acceptable in my mind, in which case your home of Brown is not clue #3 (or clue #4) at all, and therefore proper execution of "Put in below the home of Brown" (i.e. "put in below the treasure location") would be entirely dependent on correctly solving WWWH, canyon down, and NF, BTFTW. And with that, I happen to 100% agree. In essence, we would both be in the same camp that "home of Brown" is basically useless for solving the "put in" line -- just for different reasons. And I also agree that under those circumstances, the only thing you learn from line 8 w.r.t. hoB or the treasure location is that it is "above" wherever you put in.
The funny thing is, with my solution I have no issue at all with "home of Brown" being the treasure location, just so long as it isn't counted as a clue.
"Forrest has said the little girl from India can solve the first two clues- and yet not be on location."
I realize you're paraphrasing, but just a reminder that Forrest has never said she could solve those first two clues. Personally, I think absolutely she can (assuming we're using the definition of "solve" that means "reach a verdict" per my jury example, not "solve" as in "know with certainty"), but Forrest hasn't directly opined on that.
It seems you share my view that solving "Not far, but too far to walk" is essential to success. My theory is that Forrest thought that if a searcher was in the right location having solved the first 2 clues, it would not be too difficult to figure out what he was doing with #3. I think that was his biggest miscalculation -- that clue may seem pretty obvious to him (just as it seems obvious to me), but it really depends on thinking the right thoughts if the answer is what I think it is.
