Speaking from the perspective of a forecaster, I personally wouldn’t have trusted the forecasts produced as an input into important decisions.
Fwiw, I expect to very often see forecasts as an input into important decisions, but also usually seem them as a somewhat/very crappy input. I just also think that, for many questions that are key to my decisions or to the decisions of stakeholders I seek to influence, most or all of the available inputs are (by themselves) somewhat/very crappy, and so often the best I can do is:
try to gather up a bunch of disparate crappy inputs with different weaknesses
try to figure out how much weight to give each
see how much that converges on a single coherent picture and if so what picture
Fwiw, I expect to very often see forecasts as an input into important decisions, but also usually seem them as a somewhat/very crappy input. I just also think that, for many questions that are key to my decisions or to the decisions of stakeholders I seek to influence, most or all of the available inputs are (by themselves) somewhat/very crappy, and so often the best I can do is:
try to gather up a bunch of disparate crappy inputs with different weaknesses
try to figure out how much weight to give each
see how much that converges on a single coherent picture and if so what picture
(See also consilience.)
(I really appreciated your draft outline and left a bunch of comments there. Just jumping in here with one small point.)