I am saying that Ike had Cat 4 surge as a Cat 2 storm, just as Katrina had Cat 5 surge as a landfalling Cat 3. Also, tens of thousands of people remained on Galveston Island for Ike and would have been in profound risk if the track had not wobbled to the north. So we need a better, more robust classification system so people see a storm like Cat 2 Ike and think it’s not going to be a big deal since it technically is not a major under the S-S scale.
your assumption that the total variability of the storms can be fit into little boxes is fallacious.
No two storms are identical and each individual storm is constantly variable such that a classification is continuously variable.
wind speed is the only measurable variable