**Question 1:** Why are the guts well-defined?

**Answer 1:** By the JSJ theory there is a unique collection of $I$-bundles (and Seifert fibered spaces) that contain (up to isotopy) all essential product disks and product annuli (and all essential tori).  This is exactly what we are going to cut out and throw away. 

**Question 2:** Why is the pared guts well defined?

**Answer 2:** For exactly the same reason.

**Question 3:** What is the relation between pared guts and the sutured guts?

**Answer 3:** Pared guts are directed at understanding geometry.  Sutured guts have an additional homological condition (the assumption of tautness).

**Question 4:** Why do we need to consider product disks in the sutured case, but not in the pared case?

**Answer 4:** We don't need them in either case.  Consider the frontier  of a regular neighbourhood of the union of a product disk and the sutures it meets.