It “thinks out loud” to populate its token space. Asking it to shortcut risks truncating that process.

Yeah. It's "thinking" in absurd massive vectors. It needs to assess a couple to weigh out. That's the compression. That's the nature. It looks ridiculous when thinking traces render out such simple statements ('reassessing ..') but I expect this is far deeper an assessment than it can fully reflect to us on, and I expect its a huge part of their thinking.