Some things are preferences. Some are requirements. Others are tradeoffs you'd make if you got something worth more in return.
The difference matters. A preference can be weighed against cost, timing and everything else. A requirement can't: an option that fails it is out, however well it does on the rest.
The trouble is that people tend to call too many things requirements. Every item on the list starts to feel essential, and suddenly nothing passes. Or the opposite happens: a real limit, like a budget ceiling or a legal rule, gets treated as a soft preference and resurfaces late, after a lot of work has gone into an option that was never possible.
Constraints also come from outside. Deadlines, eligibility, policy, capacity and budget cycles all shape which options are open and when.
A Decidient assessment asks you to be honest about which conditions are true requirements. It applies those as rules first, then weighs everything else as tradeoffs. That keeps the comparison fair and makes the reasons behind the result easy to follow.
If your requirements leave you with very few options, that's useful to know early. It may be worth asking whether one of them is really a requirement or just a strong preference.