Oh wait, but question number 3! John zapped the kids to Caliborn using his powers, which means that Caliborn's original alpha timeline didn't account for that. That means, to create stable loops, that the original Cal!timeline involved Caliborn and Arquius and Gamzee getting sucked into Lil Cal and getting sent back without the use of John's zappy powers, right? That needs to happen to be stable, but the horrorterror's original alpha intentions can't include John's retcons by definition.

But they had to account for the retcon in order for the creation of Lil’ Cal and  Lord English to be in a stable timeloop. The retcon was always apart of the alpha timeline because without the retcon the session would have failed.