The node-engine's own since starts again at every restart, so an agent that restarted the engine in a loop kept agent-can-become-root quiet for ever (the review of 2026-10-09). The controller now keeps when it first saw the verdict waiting for the setuid search (migration 0085), forgets it at the next complete verdict, and raises once the engine's own bound has passed since; the bound and the pending reason are read from mesh-host's rootsearch.