Dave - thank you for sharing that article. I had not seen it before. It is super insightful and remains very relevant! It is very possible that some of the pilots who crashed due to "fateful decisions /eroded margins" had been following someone else before they crashed and this just wasn't mentioned in the accident report. (I have done that a few times in multi-player races on Condor and learned that way that it's never a good idea to assume that the pilot ahead knows what they are doing. In real life I have so far resisted the temptation considering differences in experience/skill level, equipment, and risk attitude. I want to keep it that way - especially as I will be flying in my first real-life contests next year.)

Tom BravoMike - yes, I could have been more explicit in mentioning that accidents are often a the result of a chain of decisions or events. Classifying them one way or another obviously required me to pick one moment in that chain. I tried to identify the one point from where the accident became probably no longer avoidable. (e.g. consider the many cases where pilots delayed a decision to land. Many of them are officially reported as stall/spins or failure to maintain a sufficient airspeed/or ground clearance. I reported them as "delayed decision to land" because that's what set off the chain of events that ultimately resulted in the accident.) If you read Dave's article, it provides several great examples for exactly those types of situations and in most cases I found it not very difficult to identify the point after which the accident could have only been prevented by sheer luck.

Clemens