Both reviewers indicate that major improvements have been made and I appreciate the work that went into that. Both reviewers also provide a well documented case that more revisions are necessary. I consider most of these easy to fix, perhaps even all of them. Nevertheless I'm reserving the right to send the paper out for re-re-review depending on how the revisions go, which is why I am classifying this as 'major' revisions. My perspective on this is that this is a paper that is likely to be influential down the road, but that many potential future users of this kind of method or results from this model may not be knowledgeable enough about the methods and assumptions to be critical and expert users. So I want to see this done right the first time with the most clean, accurate, consistent and correct formalism possible, since mistakes might not be caught easily by others down the road. Please revise according to the review comments and resubmit.

I think we have brought the process to a convergent conclusion and I am happy to recommend this for publication. My thanks to the authors and reviewers for their hard work.