CDM plus adiabatic contraction predicts the cuspiest centers in the universe at cluster cores, and Newman's seven relaxed clusters measure inner slopes near 0.5 against the predicted unity or steeper, cored over tens of kiloparsecs around the BCG. The repairs invert: feedback violent enough to core a 10¹⁵ solar mass halo must coexist with the measured gas quiescence, and the SIDM cross-sections this scale needs collide with merger offset bounds. The dwarf-scale failure recurs at ten thousand times the mass.
Collisionless collapse has one inner answer: a cusp, steepened wherever baryons contract it. Cores require erasing the model's own prediction with energy the available engines cannot deliver gently, so every cored center is a debt paid in tuned violence.
SCT predicts cored centers structurally: the gravitating profile is baryonic mass times A(r), and coherence amplification retires toward unity in inner regions where local baryonic gravity dominates the mesh contribution (P50, P52, P53), the registered radial structure whose Milky Way analog, inner amplification of 1.08 at 5 kiloparsecs against 5.97 at the virial radius, is confirmed at 0.09σ by microlensing. A cluster core's total mass is then the BCG's stars plus gas with modest amplification, no cusp stacked beneath them, and the inner slope tracks the baryons' own gentle profile: Newman's 0.5 is the signature of gravity running out of dark component toward the center, not of violence done to one. The quiescent-gas paradox dissolves because nothing needed stirring.
The scale-bridging is the diagnostic strength: one A(r) structure puts cores in dwarfs (where amplification is weak throughout) and cores in cluster centers (where it retires inward) while delivering the full A* = 5.970 at virial radii, the profile family CDM must produce with opposite baryonic stories at each scale. The registered cluster-scale version of the inner test: total-to-baryonic mass ratios approaching unity in BCG-dominated cores, rising outward along the documented A(r) curve.
This is the same retire-inward profile behind the galaxy core-cusp resolution and the lensing-is-low radial structure. There is no need to core a giant halo with engines that must also leave the gas asleep.
The inner ratio is measurable: JWST strong lensing plus IFU BCG kinematics finding cluster-core total masses demanding a dark component well beyond amplified baryons at tens of kiloparsecs, inner A(r) significantly above the registered curve, would break the retire-inward structure, as would a confirmed cuspy population of relaxed clusters matching adiabatic contraction. The Milky Way anchor carries its own kill: inner-galaxy dynamical mass exceeding 1.5 times baryonic at 2σ falsifies the same profile at its best-measured point.