TBC, I definitely agree that there's some basic structural issue here which I don't know how to resolve.  I was trying to describe properties I thought the solution needed to have, which ruled out some structural proposals I saw as naive; not saying that I had a good first-principles way to arrive at that solution.

At the superintelligent level there's not a binary difference between those two clusters.  You just compute each thing you need to know efficiently.

Lacking time right now for a long reply:  The main thrust of my reaction is that this seems like a style of thought which would have concluded in 2008 that it's incredibly unlikely for superintelligences to be able to solve the protein folding problem.  People did, in fact, claim that to me in 2008.  It furthermore seemed to me in 2008 that protein structure prediction by superintelligence was the hardest or least likely step of the pathway by which a superintelligence ends up with nanotech; and in fact I argued only that it'd be solvable for chosen special cases of proteins rather than biological proteins because the special-case proteins could be chosen to have especially predictable pathways.  All those wobbles, all those balanced weak forces and local strange gradients along potential energy surfaces!  All those nonequilibrium intermediate states, potentially with fragile counterfactual dependencies on each interim stage of the solution!  If you were gonna be a superintelligence skeptic, you might have claimed that even chosen special cases of protein folding would be unsolvable.  The kind of argument you are making now, if you thought this style of thought was a good idea, would have led you to proclaim that probably a superintelligence could not solve biological protein folding and that AlphaFold 2 was surely an impossibility and sheer wishful thinking.

If you'd been around then, and said, "Pre-AGI ML systems will be able to solve general biological proteins via a kind of brute statistical force on deep patterns in an existing database of biological proteins, but even superintelligences will not be able to choose special cases of such protein folding pathways to design de novo synthesis pathways for nanotechnological machinery", it would have been a very strange prediction, but you would now have a leg to stand on.  But this, I most incredibly doubt you would have said - the style of thinking you're using would have predicted much more strongly, in 2008 when no such thing had been yet observed, that pre-AGI ML could not solve biological protein folding in general, than that superintelligences could not choose a few special-case solvable de novo folding pathways along sharper potential energy gradients and with intermediate states chosen to be especially convergent and predictable.