Do the state challenges to the FCC maps really matter for BEAD?

As the January 13 deadline looms for states to challenge the current Federal Communications Commission broadband coverage map, many states are asking for more time. I'm starting to wonder, however, whether more time is actually all that important. The FCC process is NOT building a location-level map of actual delivered broadband speeds, but rather a map of the performance that providers say they can deliver if a customer requests it. So let's try to put all of this together and see what it means. For me, a few key takeaways stand out (All of this is not to say that state efforts to understand their own view of coverage are not needed.):

• For Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD), the only reason for a state to be prioritizing resources now to coverage challenges (and/or seeking more time) is if the result could be a higher BEAD allocation. To be precise, this means that the state's efforts must result in MATERIALLY MORE unserved locations and that the increase is finalized at the FCC BEFORE the allocation is made. 
• Given the actual nature of the coverage challenge process, I am skeptical that even with an additional 60 or 90 days the result of the FCC challenge adjudication process will be tens of thousands of locations in which the broadband providers' original submission is overturned. 
• It seems tempting to instead focus on fabric challenges, and in fact, a number of states apparently did submit fabric challenges last fall. After all, a successful fabric challenge from October 2021 basically says "this is a location that no provider even realized was there" in the prior summer 2022 coverage submission, which a common sense view says should create a strong presumption that those "newly discovered" locations should be unserved. However, I think this again fails to understand the actual FCC rules.  A "newly discovered" location added to the fabric in November or December 2022 must go through the legal process.
• If the current January 13 deadline is "extended", mostly what will happen is states will spend even more time and energy generating coverage challenges that will at best have a very low yield rate likely immaterial to the allocation outcome.  Even worse, if the cascading result was that National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) felt compelled to delay the allocation notice -- to give the FCC enough time to process the even higher number of challenges that would flood in from an extension  -- states would have lost additional months of delay in actually receiving any BEAD funds.