diff --git a/docs/benchmarks.md b/docs/benchmarks.md
index 7f17342..b9c856d 100644
--- a/docs/benchmarks.md
+++ b/docs/benchmarks.md
@@ -117,6 +117,23 @@ patched.
   trap, a public behavior change; `unowned(unsafe)` is a dangling pointer.
   Recovering this ~9% requires a design decision (an arena/index-based tree,
   or an API-versioned semantics change), not an optimization pass.
+  **Decided (#8, closed): accept for now.** Switching `parent` to `unowned`
+  is rejected outright (a trap after release contradicts the never-crash
+  posture and breaks documented nil-after-release consumers); an
+  arena/index-based tree is the designed future path but is sequenced AFTER
+  the scanning-architecture work, because scanning carries ~47% of parse to
+  this finding's ~9% and the arena is a large, correctness-sensitive change
+  that should not be taken for the smaller lever first. Reopen #8 when the
+  scanning lever has landed and the remaining gap justifies it.
+- **Dead end, do not redo (measured after pass 28):** replacing
+  `consumeAttributeValueCloseQuote`'s `advance()` with the byte-path
+  `consume(_:)` (so the already-byte-confirmed closing quote is consumed
+  without being decoded into a buffered `Character`) measured NEUTRAL in an
+  interleaved A/B despite the sampler attributing ~4% of parse to that
+  `advance()` chain: decoding one ASCII scalar into a small-string-backed
+  `Character` and dropping it costs about the same as `consume`'s
+  literal-matching path. Sample attribution at this granularity overstates
+  single-character round trips; trust only the interleaved A/B.
 
 ## Rules