I’ve been trying to think of how to say this for awhile for other folks and I may muck it up here so please don’t get offended. The best way to not lose your way with a problem like K4 is the method should come first and be independent of your result. If you get them backwards and find yourself increasingly frustrated and upset with yourself and critics then you should probably start fresh and rethink your strategy.
For example, I get an idea of a METHOD that could have been used on K4. It’s a pretty clever idea and with the loose and widely interpretable CLUES people are always going on about, I think it just might be how Sanborn did it. So I use the METHOD on the letters of K4 and come up with gibberish. At this point I make a CHOICE to continue. That can’t be it, maybe I just need to try some different variations of my METHOD. Nothing produces a word or sentence except some 3 letter ones that just encourage me to try harder. What if I take my METHOD with my favorite variation and starting with that output I reverse engineer something to refine my METHOD to give a word or sentence? If I just change the rules of my METHOD then it must be right. And so I get a couple letters or a word that with some short steps can be modified into something that almost seems like an answer but it’s not quite done. I’ve taken it this far, I should go rouse some interest in my METHOD and someone out there will surely help me finish.
It’s not that people think you’re crazy or stupid or anything bad about you really. It’s just that most of them are pretty caught up in what they are convinced is the right way and they’re hoping that they can convince you to follow them as well.
I’m not sure what other folks will say. I will say that you have some good observations but where you’re taking it doesn’t seem like it’s going to produce a good, rational two-part cipher mechanism that we can reverse to find the plain-text of K4. You will lose nothing by going back to your wife and saying, “Hey honey, I’m sorry. I should have listened to you.”
And don’t give up on Kryptos, codes and ciphers are a fun hobby. Someday we’ll finish it and look back at all the fun we had getting there.