Oh hey, it's that piece of complexity I was worried about.
The problem was that the position calculation for new appended
right_data depended on left_overlap, which fell out of sync when
transitioning from sprout->shrub.
The fix here is to keep left_overlap/right_overlap up to date with the
model that the sprout->shrub transition is effectively doing a
shrub-wide rm first.
Hacky, but hopefully avoids bugs in the future by keeping all of these
variables in a reasonable state...
There may be a simpler way to think about how this code should function,
but I just can't see it. This may deserve a rewrite in the future.