Blocked is a fine status. Dead is a fine status. The one eating your week is the one that says untested.
An item sat on a list here for a fortnight with three words next to it. Route untested. Not blocked, because nobody had ever been told no. Not dead either, because the thing was still live and waiting. Just untested, which is the most reasonable-looking phrase in operations and the most expensive.
It survived about ten reviews wearing that label. Ten times somebody read it, agreed it was in progress, and went to deal with something that had a date on it. That is not laziness. That is triage working exactly as designed, because untested items are the only ones on a board that never argue back.
Here is what it took to settle it. One click.
The route opened first time. No blocker, no error, no fight. And on the other side there was no form to fill in at all. The whole thing needed a separate account and a live call, which is a decision for a person and was never a task in the first place.
So the item was not stuck. It was a question nobody had asked out loud.
That is what makes untested the costly one. Blocked and dead both cost somebody an attempt, and an attempt always buys you a fact, even a miserable one. Untested buys nothing and looks industrious doing it, sat at the top of the board in a hi-vis jacket holding no shovel.
Untested is not a stage of the work. It is a door you have walked past ten times and never once pushed.