About that waw conversive…

Unfortunately, this role [as a stative or adjective] has commonly been misunderstood in the past, and this potential function of the perfect has been overlooked in light of the belief that there is some property inherent in the waw to make the perfect act as though it were some other aspect/tense (the “waw conversive”). Some will even go so far as to say that a perfect prefixed by a “waw conversive” ought to be understood as an imperfect! If that were the case, the Hebrew authors had a perfectly fine morpheme to express the meaning of an imperfect: an imperfect. So, why would an author not use an imperfect verb to express an imperfect meaning? That is really where the question lies.—Grant Testut, “Conjunction and Disjunction,” in ”Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? A Grammatical Tribute to Professor Stephen A. Kaufman, 277–78 (emphasis original)