PaulP: "The elegance of the physics of gravitational forcing."
Agreed, as a classically ideal principle. The real world of noisy data sets and ENSO-QBO Model Ensembles is not so "elegant".
Regarding the danger of a parsimony fallacy, Menger wrote, "It is vain to do with fewer what requires more."
Re: CC = 0.9995
That could be compelling evidence of crosstalk, as well as forcing. Its no proof of 100% forcing and 0% crosstalk. It could even be mostly crosstalk, as far as we currently can tell.
Your golden opportunity is not so much to insist ENSO-QBO are ideally elegant cases of Tidal Forcing (they are not), but to refine the estimation of chaos by quantifying the actual degree of obviously-imperfect Tidal Forcing.
The option of filtering the identified Lunisolar Cross-Talk component from buoy and sonde data will improve everyone's Models' performance, and even save lives.
These are worthy contributions to the science.