I agree with you completely. People get hung up on the fact that the conjecture has a "2-way" decision, but if you redefine the problem, there are a ton of way

I agree with you completely. People get hung up on the fact that the conjecture has a "2-way" decision, but if you redefine the problem, there are a ton of ways to make it have no decision points. The one I posed is a simple mutation, but there are turing machines that compute the Collatz algorithm, you can turn it into a geometry problem, etc. All of these can be defined as "branching" or "non-branching" however you want.