At fixed mass, massive z near 2 galaxies are 4 to 6 times more compact than local counterparts, with sizes growing as R_e proportional to (1+z) to the -1.0 to -1.5 (Trujillo 2007; van der Wel 2014). The model must explain both the extreme initial compactness and a clean growth law that requires minor dry mergers tuned in rate and orbit to deliver one scaling across types.
Galaxies in the model are born at sizes set by halo angular momentum and grown by merger accretion, so compact birth needs extreme dissipation and uniform growth needs a coincidence of merger diets. Nothing in the framework makes the observed single power law natural; it must be assembled from tuned ingredients.
SCT supplies both halves as registered machinery. Birth: collision-seeded proto-galaxies are deposited compact, their initial sizes set by the seeding geometry rather than by halo angular momentum, with low-impact-parameter events producing the densest spheroidal deposits (P22, P25, P33). The extreme dissipative collapse ΛCDM needs never happens because the concentration was the starting condition, the same deposition reading that carries the early-mass crisis (recid 107).
Growth: the canonical mechanism is the loosening of the galactic tensor mesh. Paper 7, From Chaos To Cosmic Expansion, reads inside-out size growth as the galaxy-scale member of the universal mesh-dissipation family (P14, P15): as a galaxy's outer envelope accretes ex-situ stars through minor dry mergers, its binding mesh weakens and orbits drift outward, with the canonical matched scaling R_e proportional to (1+z) to the -1.0 to -1.5 used to constrain the galactic-scale decay rate alpha_gal at roughly 1.0 to 1.5 H₀. The size-redshift law is therefore not a tuned merger-diet coincidence but the same secular weakening the Moon anchors at solar scale (recid 63) and the universe expresses as apparent acceleration, read at galactic scale. One decay family, three instruments.
Keystone economy: P33 sets the birth size, P14 grows it. The clean power law is clean because it is one mechanism, not a conspiracy of several.
Both halves are exposed. If JWST finds the earliest massive galaxies already extended, with compactness assembling gradually as dissipative models prefer, the deposited-birth half is unnecessary. The growth half is sharper: SCT requires the size-growth rate to track the mesh-decay family across scales, so a measured R_e evolution exponent falling outside the canonical 1.0 to 1.5 band at high significance, or size growth shown to be fully accounted for by counted merger events with no residual secular drift, would refute the mesh-loosening contribution.