Cutoff is where fee markets get priced, not in charts.
On Dusk's DuskDS, nobody cares that a transaction was 'cheap' if the spend band can't be defended the next morning. The question is always the same: did it behave the same when the room was busy, when Moonlight proving load crept up, when Phoenix flows were still clearing and someone wanted a yes/no before they sign.
That's why Dusk frames fees as settlement discipline. Gas isn't a vibe check though. It is a unit of work the system accounts for, tied back to validator cost recovery, and enforced the same way every time execution closes. Not because that's elegant. Because budgets don't survive surprises.
Most fee markets break institutions on shape, not size. Spikes turn operational spend into a variable nobody wants to own. A rail that's "usually low" but occasionally chaotic still fails procurement. You can not pre-approve a workflow where the same action costs two different answers depending on what happened five seconds earlier.
And this is where the neat writeups get misleading.
'Cheap" is not the control. Predictability is. Gas pricing units give you something you can budget against. Cost recovery gives Dusk validators less reason to chase congestion just to stay solvent. Fee redistribution matters mostly for what it does to incentives: do operators get paid to keep the system steady, or paid to let it whip around.
Small thing. Big downstream.
I've watched a desk move batches off a cheaper rail because variance reports kept coming back flagged. No drama. Just an internal control that wouldn't sign off on spend drift. The replacement cost more per transaction on paper... but the numbers matched the model every time, and that was the only part anyone cared about.
Thats the target on Dusk. Fees that stay legible through audits, forecasts...and bad Tuesdays, when proving queues swell and people start asking for explanations instead of receipts.
If a fee surface can't hold its shape at cutoff, it doesn't matter what the average looks like.
