Both positions here are held sincerely, and that is the finding

The people who disagree with you about this are not pretending.

The most useful observation we can offer about unequal parties is not a resolution. It is that the two standard positions, the same rule for everyone and an adjustment for circumstance, are each held by people who have thought about it and who are not disguising an interest. The person insisting on the uniform rule is often the person who has watched discretion be used badly. The person insisting on the adjustment is often the person who has watched a uniform rule land on somebody it did not fit. Both are reporting something they saw.

Once you accept that, the conversation changes shape. You stop trying to expose the other person's motive, which is unfalsifiable and inflammatory, and start comparing the failure modes each of you is most afraid of. That is a conversation with content. It can produce a design that guards against both fears at once, such as a rule with a stated exception, decided in advance, that everybody can see and nobody has to request. Neither party gets the arrangement they would have chosen alone. Both can live in it without feeling that they lost.

This is where the magazine's single position applies again, because it applies here more than anywhere. We are not going to tell you whether the shelf should be reallocated. We are going to tell you that the argument goes badly when it is conducted as a dispute about who is fair, and goes tolerably when it is conducted as a dispute about which definition governs a shelf. Naming the definition does not guarantee agreement. It does reliably convert an argument about character into an argument about a rule, and only one of those can end.