Can you objectively explain why so that I'll understand. These are the pieces that are missing for me: 1) no way without recon to see banding and how well it has wrapped around the center, 2) not enough data to judge the temps, especially vertically, is it warm core, is it vertical or tilted (and the question of vertical was really was more of a question with Delta, at times, rather than with Epsilon right at this moment), and 3) is there a wind gradient towards the center, or just a large spread-out windfield.

See now that doesn't work for me now that I've been trying for over a week to understand subtropical vs tropical. There is clearly a state of transition between the cut-off low and conversion to full tropical storm, i.e.subtopical, a valid state. One of the things I'm wondering about is that it does not seem to be all one-directional. Seems like making the call to tropical too soon in this type of environment (end of season mid-ATL, soon to be extratrop in any case), is problematic because the storm still transitions back and forth between subtropical and tropical, or doesn't ever quite make it to tropical (banding and convection at the eye fall apart, comes back). Is that a wrong assumption? During this time, is it staying warm core? Or does that vascillate as well?