you're either lying or you don't understand what you're looking at. theres a reason this conjecture wasnt disproven for almost a hundred years
I'm not saying I could have come up with the example. I'm saying looking at the example, and seeing how the two unders are connected togther, and the two overs connected together, makes it obvious that there is more freedom to move the knot around. And that freedom, at least to me, is intuitively connected to the unknotting number.
And that is why the mirror image had to be taken - you need to make sure that when you join it is over to over and under to under.
It seems intuitively obvious that there is something deeper going on here that makes these two knots work, where (presumably) many others have failed. Or more interestingly to me, maybe there's something special about the technique they use, and it might be possible to use this technique on any/many pairs of knots to reduce the sum of their unknotting numbers.