Excluding these people from the initial trials makes perfect sense to me. The various understood complications of COVID, like blood clots or minor strokes, could have been mistaken for consequences of vaccination.

Why do you suppose that there aren't any papers being generated on the topic of the recovered-from-COVID who get vaccines?

>Obviously spike protein antibodies are not the be-all and end-all of immunity to SARS-CoV-2, or we would not be observing relatively robust immunity even among recovered individuals who've had their antibody levels wane

No, but serum antibody levels against the methods viruses use to hijack our cells is a long, storied, well-understood and widely-accepted means of assessing overall systemic immune response to whatever the antibodies are against, in a way that third-order inferences about T cells aren't.