Hi @CanonicalHazard ,
Sorry, I'm struggling to follow this thread and understand all the specific questions you are trying to answer. Attaching illustrative example data really helps us to give specific answers.
But I think that your "What I suspect is the answer" sounds about right. The method is not simple but it seems fairly well documented to me. If there is something in the documentation that is not clear or that you think is missing or incorrect then you might want to contact JMP technical support (support@jmp.com). Again, illustrative example data will be useful.
How to interpret the result? I think that you are on the right lines with this as well.
DSDs are screening designs, so the objective is to understand the factors that have an important effect on the response(s) to carry forward for further study in the next stages of your sequence of experiments.
Unfortunately there is no such thing as a "clean notion" of what defines an "active" effect or factor. Personally I am not very comfortable with any distinction between active and inactive, it's just wrong to me to make that distinction. And I am certainly not comfortable that p < 0.05 is a clean distinction.
Fit DSD is a useful and quick way to find out which factors and effects are most important.
But if you want an analysis for interpretation, particularly if you are publishing, you might want to stick to the traditional model selection methods as these are better known.
You will get different results between model selection methods and that is not a bad thing. If there is reasonable consensus, then it provides useful confirmation that you can be confident of the result.
If I see big differences then I seek to understand more about the differences and what the ambiguity is. I look at more than just p-values. In fact, I don't look much at p-values. I would spend more time looking at the prediction profiler as I am much more interested in the directions and sizes of effects. When there are important differences I can use that to guide the collection of more data to get closer to resolving the ambiguities.
If you have suggestions for improving the Fit DSD report you can add them to the JMP Wish List.
I hope this helps,
Phil