A single number cannot describe an athlete. An FTP test gives you one wattage. A 5K time trial gives you one pace. Neither tells you how your fitness is shaped or how it holds up under fatigue.
Most programs you have ever followed were not built for you. They were built for someone else in another era, printed in a training book, and applied to anyone who picked it up. Every layer carries error. Zones from a population average. Thresholds from a single test. Distributions from elite-volume athletes applied to working professionals. The assumptions stack until what reaches the athlete bears almost no relationship to their actual physiology.
The performance curve works differently. It starts from the rawest data we have: the actual power you produced, the actual pace you ran, the actual heart rate cost of producing it. Every point on the curve is a real number from a real session. The athlete is the input. The data is the analysis. The program is what falls out the other side.
That is what first principles actually look like.