Because the forwarding table stores route candidates, not just one best route per destination.

A single destination may appear multiple times with different next hops.

Preferred routes are created when MTRP actually selects a forwarded path during send-time resolution.

If all current traffic uses direct neighbors, the preferred route table may remain empty.

A metric of 30 usually means the route was learned one hop away through another node.

This is expected behavior when neighbors re-advertise learned routes.

No. The indirect route is a valid candidate, but policy should normally choose the direct route because it has the lower metric.

It means the best local send-success history toward a direct neighbor.

It does not yet mean full end-to-end delivery confidence.

Not fully.

Current reliability scoring is local and observational. Protocol-level ACK behavior is a candidate future feature.