Thanks Venerable,
I’ll get back to this later in detail. For now I’ll just say that verbs as general as atthi and hoti are flexible in meaning and I wouldn’t insist on a single translation throughout. It’s extremely context dependent. Especially the Vacchagotta sutta on natthi atta is messy. I think sometimes there it means present tense, sometimes future (as in the annihilist statement).
Haven’t looked at the deva thing yet. Again, will get back to it.
On first glance I like it. But context has to decide of course.
For now, I typed the following reply offline before I read this. Perhaps it helps already. (Gotta scoot now, Zoom meditation group.)