I feel like this fixation on "punishment" as a legal term of art is not strictly necessary and my point can be reinterpreted in a charitable way that restates the same thing using different but functionally equivalent magic words.

So swap out "punishable" and instead say "legally actionable" (or other preferred synonym) and you nevertheless have an assessment that falls under what you noted is the entire fairness standard and the upshot is the same.

Also my understanding is that courts defer to the experts of the acquiring company. And if those experts are predisposed to have a favorable interpretation that favors the acquiring company, the valuation is in the less than optimal range of a range of values produced even by them, and they, by contrast to an actual market, might be much more lenient than a market would be in determining the price. So there's a convergence of variables that underscore the difference between fair as we conventionally understand the term (which is what we were all interested in here) and whatever it means to have survived legal scrutiny in Delaware.

Which again I would say means that this debate has real teeth and it's more than semantically equivalent differences in emphasis.