Jonathan, I won't agree that PV was on target, this time or any other. I have chased one too many of his claims down a rabbit hole of half truth and untruth to think otherwise.
That aside, Hawking's about-face (and I have a great deal of esteem for SH as a scientist) was a return to the principles of general relativity and covariance, not a retreat. His previous finding that black hole information is destroyed, was on the foundational side of non-deterministic quantum cosmology. Now he goes back to his roots as a relativist:
That information is preserved, that physics does not change beyond the event horizon (no firewall), that the black hole singularity does not prevent continuous information recovery (Hawking radiation) -- reinforces the singularity existence theorems of Penrose-Hawking, without contradicting other known physics or piling on ad hoc assumptions. Classical cosmology -- a massless general relativistic FRW universe with a unique simply connected solution -- gets us both a classical universe with quantum field topology, and a way to demonstrate mathematical correspondence to that model physically, with Joy Christian's measurement framework.
"The whole point is that considering the matter of active diffeomorphism is only possible if we do understand the topology, and include it in our reckoning."
Absolutely right. And foremost in our understanding has to be the simply connected solution to the FRW model. The multiply connected solution leads us the other way, to a quantum probabilistic model and destruction of information.
I hope my tone doesn't sound argumentative. We usually agree on most things.
All best,
Tom
