QGD / MDPT and ΛCDM Achievements, Structural Challenges, and a Minimal Axiomatic Alternative

ΛCDM is the most empirically successful framework in the history of cosmology. Its prediction and confirmation of the CMB acoustic peaks, its account of Big Bang nucleosynthesis, its successful description of the large-scale distribution of matter, and its use of baryon acoustic oscillations as a standard ruler represent genuine achievements of extraordinary precision. This paper addresses the ΛCDM cosmologist directly, with full acknowledgment of these achievements, and argues that the observational tensions accumulating since 2022 — the JWST early galaxy excess, the Hubble tension confirmed above 5σ, the DESI DR2 evidence that dark energy is not a cosmological constant, the S8 tension, and the CMB large-scale anomalies with a joint probability below 3×10⁻⁸ under ΛCDM — are not independent anomalies requiring independent new physics. They are a convergent pattern of consequences of three foundational assumptions that ΛCDM shares with all continuum-based physics: continuous space, metric expansion, and the cosmological constant as vacuum energy. The Quantum-Geometry Dynamics (QGD) framework, derived within the Minimally Physically Derivable Theories (MPDT) programme, dissolves the need for dark matter, dark energy, inflation, and the Big Bang singularity from two axioms. It replaces metric expansion with material drift, dark energy with dominance of the repulsive gravity component (G⁻(a;b)) beyond the threshold distance dΛ, dark matter with the free preonic background, and the singular initial state with the unique isotropic preonic configuration. Eight specific observational results from 2024–2026 that are in tension with ΛCDM are shown to be consistent with QGD predictions that follow from the axioms independently of those observations.