I can try a dynamic intermediate stop-loss point, with the intended goal that is not too early where it triggers often, and not too late where the loss mounts geometrically. This is intended to greatly limit the max loss per trade, which is good, but it still has significant risk of being triggered unnecessarily. I am highly skeptical that this will work, because I even see in the chart that it doesn't, but it's worth an actual test.

Yes, optimizations of this form can work to manage tail risk on an edge and can reproducibly lift expectancy for a strategy. GP is essentially claiming no positive edge can exist, which is false - though these edges may be short-lived and dependent on particular market regimes.