I see what you're saying, but it seems to me that your description can be misunderstood to mean that lock-free programming is simply more fine-grained locking,

I see what you're saying, but it seems to me that your description can be misunderstood to mean that lock-free programming is simply more fine-grained locking, which it is very far from. You can use mutexes to do fine-grained locking and still get into a dead-lock. Your algorithm can use only CASs and still not be deadlock-free. The general idea of lock free is to holistically design a data structure that guarantees that when you I invoke its operations in any concurrent scenario, the overall system will make progress and won't get stuck.