fix(vintage): set the two paths once, not nineteen times

[mspinola]

Root cause of the 2026-07-31 missed capture, now confirmed.

The task returned 9009, which is preflight's "executable not found" branch. Yet where cotdata-vintage and where cotdata-schedule both resolve to exactly the expected path in the expected venv.

Both are true because the wrapper repeated the two paths inline, nineteen times between them. A find-and-replace that misses one occurrence leaves seventeen correct and two wrong, and if either wrong one is in the preflight block, the run exits 9009 while every diagnostic an operator would think to run reports the paths are fine.

That is not an operator mistake worth diagnosing. It is a file worth fixing.

Change

The paths are set once, in two adjacent lines under a banner saying to edit exactly those and nothing else. All six executable invocations and every derived path read the variables. Occurrences: 19 to 2.

Two guards behind it:

• A placeholder left in either variable exits 2 with an explanation, instead of creating a directory literally named REPLACE_WITH_STORE_PATH\vintage in the task's working directory and writing a whole capture into something nothing syncs.
• The guard matches the prefix REPLACE_WITH, not either full marker, and that is load-bearing. Written the obvious way as if "%COTDATA_STORE%"=="REPLACE_WITH_STORE_PATH", a global find-and-replace rewrites the guard's own comparison string, the test becomes "does the path equal itself", and it fires on every run. A guard destroyed by the exact operation it protects against is worse than no guard. Verified by piping the file through the replacement and confirming the guard survives.

Also documented

• Give the trigger a repeat-until-success, as the COT release task already has. A daily trigger with no repeat turns one failure into a lost day.
• The first run after upgrading takes minutes and reports ~140,000 observations, because the prior year has never been captured. One-off, not a fault.

No library change. 257 tests still pass.

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