"Typical patterns"

[Tropylium]

I posted previously some observations based on the concept of "typical Life patterns".

I'm thinking of how to quantify "typicalness". An approach that seems promising might be a simple bounding box approach:
• If the smallest parent of an M×N pattern is of size M'×N', it has a typicality rank of (M+N)–(M'+N')-4. This can be obviously broken into distinct horizontal and vertical components, and moreover NWES components.
• a 0-typical pattern has a parent that fits within (M–2)×(N–2) (the minimum typicality possible). The smallest such pattern is generation 5 of T-tetromino, the 5×5 diamond. Other common examples include gen 8 (4 crosses) and gen 10 (traffic lights in the "+" phase) of the same; gens 18, 20, 22, 24, 27 (= finished honeyfarm) of a bun; gen 9 of pi-heptomino.
• the smallest 1-typical pattern is 4×5, ie. the diamond minus one corner cell, which has a 3×3 parent.
• the smallest 2-typical pattern is the beehive (3×4 ← 3×2)
• the smallest 3-typical pattern is the V spark (3×3 ← 3×2)
• a 4-typical pattern either has a parent of the same size, or one that's wider but shorter. Vacuum is trivially 4-typical; the smallest non-zero such pattern is the blinker.
• from 5-typical on, patterns only have parents larger than themselves.
• a domino is 6-typical
• a dot is 8-typical
• 9+-typical examples are not obvious to come up with but I hypothesize they dominate at large pattern sizes
• more generally, I hypothesize that at least for the lower values, let's say x < y ≤ 8, if y-typical patterns of a given size exist, they are more numerous than x-typical ones
• there is probably a maximum typicality, around maybe 12-16?

We could also speak of the typicality of a particular pattern transition: the first steps of a B's evolution are 4, 2, 3, 3, 3, 2, 4, 2, 4, 4, 3, 4. Perhaps more illuminating though would be 4 – typicality (we could call this "growth rate" or something): this sequence then becomes 0, 2, 1, 1, 1, 2, 0, 2, 0, 0, 1, 0 and it is simple to see the pattern is growing.

A more finer-granulated measure of typicality might take all parents of a pattern into account, with smaller parents very strongly weighed compared to larger ones (after all, any given pattern has arbitrarily large parents) — but this seems difficult to calculate. Considering the bounding octagon rather than rectangle might also produce some further insight.