Note: The way I ended this post shocked me, it wasn't planned, but I think I'll leave it as is. I have numbers to run.
I'm going to cover two issues in this post. The second, your 3 party detection system, has a physical equivalence to a QM effect in a rather classic series of three polarizers. This lead me to consider an experiment that would falsify my detection rate verses coincidence objection.
Issue #1
The first is the notion of realism again. If I'm required to maintain a strict adherence to Bell Realism as you have defined it, there simply is no way around it in the Bell's theorem context. Yet I find this restriction unwarranted, even in the context of EPR. The EPR paper stated: "A comprehensive definition of reality is, however, unnecessary for our purpose". What was defined was given on the limited grounds of "sufficiency" as needed for the EPR case provided in the paper. Yet even to this definition is was said: "Regarded not as necessary...". Yet even with these equivocations I think the paper failed to appreciate the richness in the way measured variables can vary in relation to the states that define them. Consider the words of Schneider:
http://www.drchinese.com/David/Hume's_Determinism_Refuted.htm
[PLAIN said:
http://www.drchinese.com/David/Hume's_Determinism_Refuted.htm]A[/PLAIN] review of the problem shows that we cannot, in principle, ever observe an independent variable. For it to be identified unambiguously as being independent, such variable can have no causal connection to other observables. (If there is any causal connection to another variable, then the cause cannot be narrowed to the hypothetical independent variable.) If it has no causal connection to other observables, then it cannot be observed! For all intents and purposes, it would not be part of the observable universe.
How would such an independent variable, which only intermittently maintained causal connections to other observables, fare in in this notion of Bell Realism? It would certainly rule out determinism and Bell Realism in the empirical arena, yet still be entirely feasible in principle in the theoretical arena. It wouldn't be any more unwarranted than any mathematical postulate. You've, to my understanding, stated contextual variables are not real, real variables have "simultaneous definite answers", etc., yet I can't even be sure any such measurable variable exist. Planck's constant probably being the most difficult to contextualize, though some have tried.
Let's start with this question to articulate this issue: Is the following 3 variables contextual, real, or both; space, time, and mass?
Issue #2
I'll start with how to falsify my detection rate verse coincidence objection, and perhaps this will provide the meaning. Your 3 party EPR correlation is essentially equivalent to a textbook example of a set of 3 polarizers in series. When 2 of them are put in series, set at 90 degrees from each other, no light will pass through both of them. Yet place a third polarizer placed between them, set at 45 degrees to the other 2, then 12.5% of the randomly polarized light will pass through all 3 of them, even though none could make it through just 2 at the same settings. Now we're going to do a version of your 3 party correlation test with photon polarization, except measure detection rates (intensity variance), rather than coincidences, and in a parallel rather than series. I'm personally not so concerned with absolute intensity or large separations to rule out local mechanisms, prior empirical data well satisfies me in that regard.
Place an emitter at the point of origin which emits polarized photons some distance to a pair of detectors on the + and -x axis. The output of the emitter will be constant over time for reference. The initial orientation of the polarizers at the detectors will match the polarization of the emitted photons, and the detection rate (intensity), not coincidences, are measured. Now this is like photons passing through a series pair of polarizers with a common polarization settings. In the series when you rotate one polarizer the light intensity through the 2 is reduced. Question: When you rotate polarizer A in the parallel setup will it induce a change detection rates (intensity) crossing polarizer B, like in the series arrangement? If so, my detection rate verse coincidence objection is busted. If not, this counterfactually entails that a change in polarization settings involves changing the actual individual particles involved in making correlation comparison. Thus couterfactual assumptions are empirically voided even before coincidence counts takes place.
Counterfactual assumptions have another problem in the properties of polarizers, as the 3 polarizer textbook example illustrates. When we measure the polarization of a photon, any photon that has a polarization near enough to the polarizer setting has some chance of being detected as having a polarization equal to that polarizer setting, which it does thereafter because the polarizer set it. Thus, when we talk about measuring polarization, we are actually, in most cases, resetting the polarization of that subset of particles which have properties close enough to be successful. Yet we call this a detection of a property that we just reset to that value ourselves. The amazing thing is that, when you adjust polarizer A out of alignment with B, you change the properties of the photons passing through it. Yet when you change B, to put it back in line with A, you change the properties of those photons in exactly the same way and sequence that A initially changed the properties of the photons at the other end, recreating the correlations. Does that crack the deterministic interpretation? It even provides the specific macroscopic context, polarizers resetting particle properties, which defines the context of the so called contextual variables. That would mean coincidence statistics are dependent on common spatial polarization, and the polarizers are simply resetting, not strictly measuring, that polarization, preferentially those nearest the polarizer setting.
