Thank you both Thomas S and PEARL for chiming in. Your replies are extremely telling.
If we look at the cherry tree simile, it would seem to indicate that a kyara tree could qualify as a kyara tree no matter whether it contained any kyara or even any degree of infection: A cherry tree doesn't need to bear fruit in order to be classified as a cherry tree. But your next comparison takes a different view, which is echoed in PEARL's reply: that any agarwood tree, whether of the Aquilaria or Gyrinops genera, be it Aquilaria Crassna or Agallocha or Malaccensis or Sinensis, or Gyrinops Decipiens, Caudata, Walla, etc—has the potential to produce Kyara.
This stands in stark contrast to the Baieido 'official stance' on the subject, which I have discussed at length way back in the day with David Oller. He maintained that Kyara could only originate in trees of the Aquilaria Sinensis species that grew in Vietnam.—Anything not harvested in Vietnam, cannot be Kinam. That's the motto. Oller moreover posits that Kyara has a unique chemical profile which is not found in other types of jinko. There is a certain chemical called Dihydrokaronone which can only be found in Vietnamese Sinensis trees, as I recall him saying long ago and far away.
Now what does that say about the theory that any tree of the Aquilaria or Gyriniops genera could potentially yield Kyara? It would suggest that all Malaysian, Indonesian and New Guinean agarwood trees are going to be 'medical students' for quite a long time! They don't stand a chance of ever producing Kyara. If Kyara is a unique, ultra rare species of Aquilaria tree that only grows in Vietnam, as Baieido maintains, then a Kyara tree is a Kyara tree irrespective of whether it contains any Kyara, just as an apple tree remains an apple tree even if it never bears a single apple.
If the other theory is true, and Kyara is indeed the fruit of a unique combination of events which may take place in any type of Aquilaria or Gyrinops tree, then my original question still remains unanswered.... If that process is already in motion and we harvest the tree before the Kyara oleoresin has solidified, is not the essential oil currently amassing inside the trunk and slowly thickening and hardening into that oleoresin, Kyara essential oil?
If you say not, does that not entail that Kyara is only a type of wood, which is made up of undistillable hard resin that is chemically completely unrelated to the essential oil that collected and amassed into that resin over a period of many decades? I find that to be just a tad implausible. But don't panic. That is just my view. And I feel entitled to it just as anyone else might feel entitled to theirs.
One enthusiast admits being sold 'Kyara' by the owner of a major Japanese incense company which when shown to the owner of a different company was promptly dismissed as non-Kyara.—If the bigwigs of the Kyara trade themselves cannot agree as to what constitutes Kyara, who can?
It is fair to say, at this point, that Kyara is a subject we need to agree to disagree about. It is far from clear, given the amount of conflicting definitions of Kyara among artisans, hobbyists, incense manufacturers, agarwood hunters, million-dollar Kyara collection owners, and other enthusiasts—just what exactly Kyara is, where it originates, what triggers its formation, how it can be accurately identified.
In a subject as disagreed upon as this, where no two connoisseurs believe the same thing, how can any contributor be labelled as a marketing heretic for using the term to relate their understanding of Kyara's olfactory profile? Is it not rather rash of our Kyara experts to flame anyone who does not subscribe to their view of what constitutes Kyara, or how the term should be used, when they themselves cannot tell you what Kyara is to begin with?