I'm not sure i agree. The blobs are exactly where the surface appear to be because they are constrained by multiple viewing angles.

Otherwise the splat would fall apart as soon as the viewing angle is changed slightly (Which it absolutely does in many examples on supersplat, you cannot really create an out of distribution view with 3GS, it's not magic)

Yes, my statement was loose. The blob doesn’t really have a position since it is theoretically an infinite distribution in 3 space.

It has a mean, and that mean doesn’t have to lie on the surface, consider the case where the mean is deep inside the strawberry but its spike contributes to the surface appearance (e.g a seed could be represented this way, or it could be represented by a small well-oriented blob on the surface, the optimiser doesn’t care)