But the whole point of Psychohistory (as it’s presented in the books) is that there aren’t any “Chosen Ones” at all. Sure Salvor isn’t one, but Gaal isn’t eith

But the whole point of Psychohistory (as it’s presented in the books) is that there aren’t any “Chosen Ones” at all. Sure Salvor isn’t one, but Gaal isn’t either; no one is. That’s the entire point. Under Psychohistory, it shouldn’t matter who the leader is; what matters is the forces on the population as a whole and that populations respond to those forces in predictable ways. Individual leaders come and go and really don’t matter very much on the big-scale stuff that Psycho-History is making predictions about. It’s the whole basis of the first several books that this “large forces acting across whole populations” model is the ‘true’ way that civilisation-scale history works and why the future history is so predictable (before stuff starts going a bit off the rails later on in ways that I’m not going to spoil). To me, if you’re not using that concept as the bedrock of the story you’re telling, then you’re not telling a Foundation story. (It might be a quite good science fiction story of course, just not Foundation)