The very existence of the crosswalk is a controlled variable; its condition is a parameter of its variability.
I say again, in this you are wrong. Conflict is not always present in collective control, and is not essential to it. Nor do the definitions and descriptions by Kent and Martin and I say that collective control entails conflict. For example, on page 242 of the Handbook:
The important point to remember here is that collective control can result in stabilization of some features of shared environments whether or not conflict is involved.
It’s the other way around. PCT as formulated in Powers et al. 1963, Powers 1973/2005 and other writings talk extensively about conflict but they do not provide for collective control. You are trying to fit collective control into a stage of the science that does not provide for it. It appears that the only way that you can see to accommodate collective control in your understanding of PCT is by reducing collective control to a kind of byproduct of conflict. Those who have actually investigated collective control have identified phenomena and have developed concepts and terminology for dealing with these phenomena in an organized way. Putting the pre-collective-control stage of PCT first is the opposite of ‘phenomena phirst’.
Some of this I have taken off to a discussion of data and modeling.