I'm not sure if this changes/confirms anything, but I looked at his individual hairs and noticed bands, does this signify he has agouti?
Also I just noticed that you said he might be ticked with an underlying pattern, being classic or mackerel. Does that still apply now or is he just mackerel?
I think it's awesome you know all of this, so I was just curious, is there any specific website/place you learned all of this? Or did you kind of just pick it up?
I'm kind of interested in learning a bit more about it too
I have a lot of friends who breed, as I’m in the cat fancy, though there are plenty of resources online messybeast is a pretty good site to have a read about colour genetics.
For comparison I did a collage of your kitty and some Sibs… some are in Siberia on a farm and you can see how super fluffy they are For some reason I had to make it tiny to upload it here. But you can pinch at ends to see it bigger or maybe download.