Our kinetic model in Fig indicates that MS1, despite its low population, is a necessary stop on the path from the metastable to the stable form. Thus, THI can be viewed as taking place in two consecutive steps: change of the stator pucker to that of the final stable form, followed by rotation of rotor, relative to the stator, to complete THI. Metastable substates 3 and 4 (MS3, MS4), which hold the majority of the population, are similar in conformation, as they only differ by their rotor pucker, and they interconvert quickly. Metastable substate 2 (MS2) is the closest to the stable form in terms of its central torsion angle (defined as e.g. 18-15-14-10 or 17-18-2-1), but the model implies that MS2 is actually the furthest kinetically from the stable form. This finding highlights the potential drawback of choosing a single geometric feature as the reaction coordinate: using only the central torsion angle as the reaction coordinate risks giving the incorrect impression that a motor in MS1, MS3, or MS4, needs to go to MS2 as the obligatory last step before reaching the stable form. Exploring mechanisms by unconstrained MD simulations, instead of exploring along predefined reaction coordinates, helps avoid such problems. These high dimensional MD trajectories are free of bias or information loss from inexact assumptions based on low dimensional intuitions, yet the trajectories can be projected to informative lower dimensional pictures based on analysis of structure and kinetics.