[sfriedr]

> Unless they have been shown to be relevant in any way, I don't see why the paper need cite them.

Fair. Your argument then falls precisely into category (C) of the four mutually exclusive options I outlined above.

But you'd then need to argue why the 6 models you compared against is the comprehensive model sample to test against, that contains -- and not just some arbitrary set of recent models that happen to be dominated by the newly proposed model. (And maybe that is indeed the case; then it should be easy enough to update the arxiv draft by incorporating a section where you argue along those lines.)