I agree with most of what you said, but I think I might respectfully disagree in part.
I think that to an extent the higher surge was baked in. The expanse of it I think ended up lower geographically because the RMW ended up smaller and the specific landfall location to a lesser extent. There are examples of former upper echelon hurricanes bringing tremendous surge—Katrina obviously, but I think Ike and Opal are other examples.
At its peak, here was the NHC surge forecast
Of course the northern extent of this won’t verify but that’s because of landfall location and size. At this point, the NHC essentially had a Tampa hit:
The NHC expects to find 9-13’ in the peak surge zone, verifying their peak surge forecast. I don’t like people speaking in absolutes in tropical, but I do think it was clear this was going to be one of the worst surge events for the west coast of Florida and in some spots that forecast looks to verify.
Maybe we’re saying the same thing though lol