I mean that when a net energy analysis is undertaken, they don't adjust for other inputs. So if a 5:1 EROI, assumes away other non-energy inputs, like land, labor etc. A 3:1, 5:1 20:1 EROI all say nothing about labor, time, land, etc.

Ah. In other words, for the purposes at hand, we can only regard an energy analysis (EROEI, net, or other), as useful if it takes scalability into account. And this remains so if I use price as a proxy for energy, which is an additional viewpoint that may shed light on the matter. Or, to put it another way, if someone manages to put together a magical 'zero point energy' device that extracts one nanowatt-hour per year from the volume of the Earth, we can, for our purposes, disregard it absolutely and utterly. Yup, I'm OK with that.

So we add scalability analysis as a criterion or requirement to examine when refereeing energy-source analysis.