subscribers now retry with exponential backoff capped at 30 min (was 60s cap with hard kill at 15 failures). on successful connect, backoff resets to 1s and host flips back to active. hosts that fail 15+ consecutive times are marked dormant (observable) but the subscriber keeps retrying. a reconciliation loop every 5 min respawns any active/dormant host missing from the worker map. this eliminates dependence on the external reconnect cron for host retention — it can be reduced to discovery-only. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>