MASTER_PLAN.md — product rebuild plan, all decisions made

[mrlucas679]

One file that supersedes every previous planning document.

• Core diagnosis: the hackathon failed on three root causes — demoing the impossible half (camera SASL recognition), having no definition of "working", and putting a small LLM first in the live translation path.
• Product rescope: v1.0 = Counter Mode — one window, one shared screen, deterministic hearing↔deaf communication. Camera recognition moves to a gated research track.
• 17 decisions closed (window model, stack, pipeline order, auth, CORS, branches, cleanup, avatar, team, pilot).
• Dataset-first long game: POPIA-gated consented SASL collection; verified pretraining corpora listed (BOBSL, YouTube-ASL, How2Sign, WLASL, ASL Citizen, PHOENIX-2014T, CSL-Daily, AUTSL); one unverifiable dataset from prior research explicitly flagged.
• Phases gated by tests, not dates; Phase 0 starts with the last surviving defect (routes.py:83) and the rules-first pipeline reorder.

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