Status: IN
Strategy's optional participation (Context falls back to default behavior when no Strategy is set) combined with the general GoF principle that patterns should not be applied indiscriminately demonstrates a pattern-level design for graceful degradation: patterns can be designed to be incrementally adoptable rather than all-or-nothing, reducing the cost of judgment errors in pattern selection.
Strategy's optionality plus its judgment drawback validate incremental pattern adoption as a risk-mitigation strategy
Depends on (SL): strategy-participant-can-be-optional, gof-strategy-optional-with-default-behavior, strategy-drawback-validates-judgment-necessity