Thank you for the answer, I appreciate the time you took to write it.
As I understand it, there is a legal vehicle which performs the actual transfer and the NFT transfer acts as a signal of interest for both parties. In that case, I see the benefit that neither party is bound to a certain platform/software to initiate the transfer. But overall, I admit that I still do not see why this requires zero trust and decentralization as primitives in the solution, which come with hefty caveats each.
Thank you for the short summary (assuming you understand it correctly); I was having trouble following the legal rights and obligations of the different parties.
I also share your confusion: if a central body is trusted in this scenario, then why can't the atomic transactions be equivalently performed on a public Merkel tree with a centralized source of truth?
Actually, immutability may probably not even required/desired given the surrounding legal construct and the described processes.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and the previous post is my understanding of the described as a layman. I am pretty firm on the technical concepts surrounding blockchain solutions, though.
I could see immutability as being useful for the same reason that append-only databases in general can be useful, to ensure that unlogged transactions are inherently ruled out. Even with an immutable data structure, changes by the trusted central body can always be encoded as overlaid "corrections".
Compliance with present and future privacy laws could easily become an issue, though, unless those laws contain specific carve-outs.
(I'm also no lawyer, I've just been interested in the cryptography surrounding the big blockchain projects. Much of it looks like it could be surprisingly useful outside the trustless, decentralized contexts everyone likes to talk about.)
As I understand it, there is a legal vehicle which performs the actual transfer and the NFT transfer acts as a signal of interest for both parties. In that case, I see the benefit that neither party is bound to a certain platform/software to initiate the transfer. But overall, I admit that I still do not see why this requires zero trust and decentralization as primitives in the solution, which come with hefty caveats each.