I mean. It did focus on a requested character. And the requested characters did interact. They just didn't, you know, interact in a well-written way that actually said anything about their relationship with each other. I mean, maybe my quickly made-up example gave the wrong impression of how much character 2 appeared in the story, but I've said several times that it was enough to pretty clearly be within the rules. And you can't DNW poorly-written and stilted interactions and trying to DNW around the other would have basically been a gen ban even if I said friendship was ok, and unenforceable anyway.

I'm glad other methods might have worked for people in related situations, I'm just equally baffled by your insistence that surely there must have been a way to force someone to fill that prompt the way I wanted it to be filled if I tried hard enough. Sometimes the exact story you want just isn't going to happen in an exchange and that's ok actually? If people went to the mods every time they were mildly disappointed by getting fics that technically follow the rules, the mods wouldn't have time to do anything else.