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I only bring up Condorcet as if we are going to be doing ranked choice ballots we have all these other better options. Options where counts can be aggregated from different polling centers and that provide better mathematical guarantees. I don't think later-no-harm is a good outcome. If a candidate B becomes more popular with a subgroup, but doesn't reach the threshold of being their first choice, candidate B should be more likely to win the election. I'd much rather have monotonicity, so that rating a candidate higher makes them more likely to win.
I'll grant that your threshold choice is inherently tactical, but I think it is a much better brand of tactical than other things that fall under the label. In IRV, tactical votes are misrepresenting your preferences to the voting system. You have to lie about who you actually like and dislike. In approval voting, you are compressing down the vote to provide as much information as possible to the voting system. It is a "true preference" that you like everyone you voted for more than everyone you didn't. It doesn't reward liars, it rewards those in touch enough to know roughly the bounds of possibility for this election.
But yeah, I guess there are some real selling points of IRV:
-a lot of the other ranked choice methods aren't clone independent which is definitely a problem that needs a solution
-you can just walk in and list your candidates in order and be voting "optimally for your desired outcomes" a good chunk of the time.
I still think ranked methods aren't worth the cost (really try it, with a group of even 5 people trying to decide what to do, ranked methods are demolished by approval voting in terms of implement-ability, then extend to the entire country). IRV among them is particularly bad for counting but is among the better set of election properties and especially explain-ability.
(Also, you've been a great conversation partner, kudos and gratitude)
Inherently, no, but later-harm produces tactical voting. Worse, it produces tactical voting in a mass-producible way; political parties will figure out which full ballot by their supporters will be best for them, and push it hard. Full how-to-vote cards are a thing in Australia, but the parties don't push them all that hard due to later-no-harm.
Now, yes, later-no-harm is incompatible with a bunch of other criteria, which is annoying. But, well, impossibility theorem.
I mean, yes, the O(N!) worst-case is a pain. I will say that it's not nearly as bad in practice as the worst-case; a good number of seats in Australia have [#2 > all votes other than for #1 and #2], which simplifies it to 2 buckets (and a lot of the rest have [#3 > all votes other than #1/#2/#3], which simplifies it to 6 buckets). Usually the AEC can predict this ahead of time; they do a full recount if their prediction is wrong, of course, but most seats are known within hours.
(STV absolutely always is a nightmare, though; we use it for our Senate, and it takes over a week to count. AIUI it's worse in terms of tactical voting, too.)
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