Shows get a priority, so the news is not stuck behind a back catalogue

Peter's framing: a few shows are news and stop being worth hearing within a day,
a tier he keeps up with, and a long tail that is not topical at all. It matters
because recognising one episode costs the server about five minutes, so a
five-hour back-catalogue episode arriving the same morning as the news takes
most of a cycle before the news is looked at.

Three tiers and no more. A number would invite fiddling and would not mean
anything; these are the three distinctions that were described.

The tier rides beside the subscription list rather than inside it, so a server
that knows nothing about tiers reads the list exactly as before and a phone that
knows nothing keeps pushing what it always did. Only the shows placed somewhere
other than the default are sent -- "ordinary" for sixty shows is the same
information as nothing, in sixty times the space.

It orders both the poll and the recognition queue. Recognition now sorts on
three things in the order they matter: a topical show first, then an episode
whose answer checks itself against the length gap, then newest.

**A tier only exists for a subscribed feed**, which a test caught: the list and
the tiers arrive in one push, and setting the tiers after the list put back a
placement for a feed that same push had just removed. A resubscription months
later would have inherited it.

Unrecognised tiers are ignored at both ends and read as the default, which is
the one that starves nothing -- the same rule the label store follows for a
verdict it does not know. Schema 20, migrated and checked on a device.

The control says what it does not do as well as what it does: nothing about
playback changes, and a show placed anywhere still plays, downloads and skips
identically. A setting that looks like it changes playback and does not is worse
than no setting.

The coverage gate caught the push body having no test, which was fair -- it is
hand-built JSON going over the wire, where a missing brace is a library that
silently stops being mirrored. Its exact output is now pinned, including a URL
with a quote in it.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_018AwnALZL6bD4VBtATDVv3B

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