FLORENCE: East Coast Threat or Does She Sleep With the Fishes?

Probably going to catch hell for this, but I'm sick and don't care lol The 18z NAM's current depiction makes the most sense to me given how things have evolved, along with parts of my initial ideas. If I was to make a forecast, I would keep my same landfall spot as I provided what will be a week ago tomorrow, but adjust the second "leg" basis the following:

Even if there is no initial landfall, I believe that Florence would drift into the coast, ride it northward for a (relatively) short distance, then drift inland (with erratic, but generally westward and then northwestward motion). The reason for this is dynamical. Yes, I understand that the ridging is strong and the storm cannot simply cut through it. While the strength of the ridge was not something that I ever personally felt that I underestimated given all of the sources of latent heat energy available to feed back, I (apparently) underestimated its impact along its southern periphery, which is why I initially thought that it would reach the Delmarva before it had its northward progression halted. Why? Because the body of the anomaly is centered so far north and west compared to climatology, I assumed with a storm that has a fair forward speed would be able to penetrate a little more deeply before losing momentum. As of now, that appears to have been an incorrect assumption.

However, my thinking for the above correction is not based on that, but on the dynamics of the wind field of the storm itself. With a storm/winds this powerful, even IF the eye does not make a technical landfall during the initial northwestward progression, as long as it's sufficiently close to the coast such that the stronger wind velocities  within the CDO/eye wall can begin interacting with the coastline, this will begin to create mesoscale pressure imbalances between the north and south sides of the storm. Think about it - in the northeastern and northwestern quadrants the wind will be forced to begin converging due to the natural effects of friction. However, on the south side, the air will actually begin to diverge as the wind can again accelerate over the open water as it comes from the southwestern through the southeastern quadrant. Where the air is converging at the surface, it will induce a local trough of lower pressure and be forced to rise, whereas the diverging air to the south will induce locally higher pressure as air sinks to replace it. Now, again, this will likely occur (in my opinion, of course), even if the eye is still offshore, and will not persist indefinitely as the storm spins down. Secondarily, this will also begin working to help elongate the central circulation and disrupt its uniform nature. Once this process begins, it will quickly work to begin disrupting the central circulation, as storms of this magnitude can only attain such strength because the conditions are perfect and allow it to. Once those conditions are altered, the storm has only one way to go, down in intensity. Now, please do not misunderstand me here. I am not saying it will go from 60-0 immediately. All I am saying is that I do not foresee the storm MAINTAINING its initial intensity, or taking as long to spin down like some of the models show.

As the system begins to decay from the inside, the wind imbalances will then start acting to try to draw the system away from land (think of vectors!), but due to the anomalous ridging out ahead of it and weakness in the ridging to its west, and is then why I think it gets "bullied" inland and decays in North Carolina. Similarly, this also why I do not agree with the sudden depictions of the storm traversing further south with a (secondary?) landfall in South Carolina. I could be totally off on this, but hopefully it's some food for thought, and if nothing else, I hope you enjoyed the read lol

Edit: west-central ATLANTIC trough