Dear David, I fully agree with you; we cannot exclude all these species, and I add: We cannot exclude something else. What we learned from the “Mimbon 98”-case was: Most similar to alfredi, but possibly a very similar variant. Without any reliable informations on the location we are bound to keep silent on this question. We can surely exclude phoenicurus, for wild phoenicurus always had this slightly elongated caudal. (They lost this feature in the secnd or third filial generation, indicating that possibly phoenicurus is still veryay near to tweediei. More we are unable to say).
I understand your interest in giving the beautiful fish a name, but we can’t. We can only observe and describe the fish in all behavioural situations as acutely and most differentiated as possible, and you do so. That’s the speciality of your fine descriptions. Even if we receive further informations about the locality we might not be able to decide the question, but we could exclude either Kalimantan-species or Malaysia-species.
In the last run even the young descriptions from 2005 (by Kottelat and Ng) are not certain for all times. Without clear data from genetic instigations we cannot state such slight species differentiations for all times. The taxonomic means of these taxonomists are – outdated, sorry.