[pajuhaan]

Electron capture doesn’t contradict “electrons don’t fall into protons.” In an atom, the electron isn’t a tiny ball spiraling inward; it’s a stable quantum state.

But for inner orbitals there’s still some chance of finding the electron right at the nucleus. if the nucleus can lower its energy by turning a proton into a neutron, the weak interaction can use that overlap and the capture happens. so it’s not an electromagnetic “collapse”; it’s a weak nuclear transition that only becomes possible in certain nuclei.

My point is that a deeper microdynamics can still reproduce the familiar quantum phenomenology (including Dirac as the macroscopic limit); what would separate it from "repackaging or pseudo-theory" is if it actually predicts the physical constants and transition behavior that the standard model largely treats as input or has no idea about them, rather than explaining them.