Agreed, just because something isn’t necessarily being actively argued about but lies within the subtext of the argument, doesn’t mean that one is being held to a different standard or being argued as a better system over the other. The fact of the matter is that if someone is arguing that gulags are bad, as an example, then they probably think the modern prison system is also bad. The heart of the argument is that forced labor institutionalization is bad and it shouldn’t take much introspection to understand that, but when someone enters the argument with whataboutism it’s now seen as bad faith because they don’t appear to understand the argument, just who’s making it and what side it’s currently criticizing.

How tasty?

Redundancy is almost always a good thing. If something goes wrong with one form, they have the backup while they fix it.

There is a road going up there, and as another user pointed out there are overland cables connecting it to the rest of the system.