Great post.
I think this related to what @yuvaltaylor calls augmenting factors and what you described here are examples of procedures of finding these augmenting factors.
I’ve had some succes using a similar factor using the high yield spread as pointed out here: Crisis Investing - #4 by RTNL. Basically it is the same but instead of RSP:USA, ##CORPBBOAS and a minimum treshhold for the high yield spread (>5). Gives similar resuts.