Five weeks. Same app. Five different blockchains. The experiment: build a tip-jar app once, deploy it to a different chain each week, score the developer experience on eight dimensions (tooling, docs, cost, contract authoring, frontend integration...), max 60 points. No changing the app mid-series. No adjusting the rubric. Same build, different neighbourhood each week. Final scores: Base 56/60, Core DAO 46/60, TON 43/60, Scroll 42/60, Solana 41.5/60. What the research kept getting wrong Before each build I ran a research pass and estimated the score. It overestimated every non-EVM chain: 8 points on Scroll, 3 on Core DAO, 8.5 on Solana. TON was the only zero delta. Every point of that gap came from the same two places: economics that didn't match the docs, and runtime gotchas that only showed up at smoke test on a live endpoint. Not the VM model. Not the language. Documentation tells you how to deploy. It doesn't tell you whether the economics work for your use case, or which mental models to discard.…