You're right and I understand that. I was assuming some hypothetical attack that is equivalent to GNFS. That assumption has no theoretical basis, it's just used as a mechanism to question the ideas and get some intuition. I'm using the same line of argument used in the original presentation where they show a progression and make assumptions about what that means about RSA keys. I think that line of reasoning is odd but even under that line of reasoning the results don't make sense to me.