Dust lanes in lenticulars and ellipticals, Centaurus A's warped band the canonical case, hold asymmetries and warps that settled equilibrium forbids (Graham 1979). The merger-debris explanation buys asymmetry with recency, but the lanes are common enough to strain merger rates and several persist dynamically ordered while asymmetric: old and unsettled at once.
A relaxed potential gives dissipative material no stable home except the symmetric principal plane, so every asymmetric lane must be young debris in transit. Lanes that are old, ordered, and still asymmetric have no place in the inventory, and isolation removes the perturbers that could refresh them.
SCT offers the sustained organizing influence the relaxed picture lacks, in two familiar parts. The first is inherited geometry: dusty gas carrying a distinct angular momentum component from the host's deposit history (P31, P32) settles to its own inherited plane rather than the stellar body's, the same dual-J reading that carries the polar-ring family (recid 104) and NGC 6822's perpendicular axes (recid 142); a lane misaligned with its host's principal axes is then a second inheritance, stable by conservation, not debris in transit. The second is the standing tide: the mesh term's tidal gradients, strongest where local binding is weakest (P51), lean steadily on the lane's outer reaches with the environment's geometry, warping and skewing the settled configuration persistently, the same standing influence behind the galactic warps (recid 123, recid 124).
Old and unsettled stops being a contradiction: the lane settled long ago, to an inherited plane, and is held asymmetric by a tide that never goes away. The registered discriminant follows the warp family's: lane asymmetry orientations should correlate with the environment's large-scale geometry rather than scatter randomly, and lane kinematics should show ordered long-lived rotation rather than the disturbed settling of recent debris. Formalism in Paper 5, From Chaos To Corotating Hierarchies, and Paper 6, From Chaos to Cosmic Collisions.
Keystone economy: P31 gives the lane its own plane, P51 keeps it leaning. Permanence was the clue, not the problem.
The kill runs through kinematics and statistics: if deep observations show the asymmetric lanes kinematically disturbed and young, with ages and settling times consistent with recent merger debris across the population, the transient picture stands and the held-off-axis reading is unnecessary. SCT separately requires asymmetry orientations to correlate with mapped environmental geometry; lanes oriented randomly with respect to their surroundings at high significance would remove the standing-tide component.