<p>The field of phylogenetic systematics, founded by the German entomologist and theorist Emil Hans Willi Hennig (1913-1976), became a central battleground in the so-called systematics wars, a period of intense conflict between competing schools of taxonomic thought. A critical turning point in this debate was Joseph Felsenstein’s articulation of “Hennig’s Dilemma,” a critique which asserted that Hennig relied on biologically unrealistic assumptions: that one must know with absolute certainty the ancestral state of every character, that evolutionary reversals to an ancestral state are impossible, and that homoplasy is prohibited. In this way, there would be no solution to resolving tree incompatibilities. This so-called dilemma and assumptions were highly effective; they successfully painted parsimony as a fatally flawed method, clearing the path for the dominance of maximum likelihood and other model-based approaches to systematic theory and practice. The consequences of this “victory” are still felt today, with morphological data and parsimony analysis largely marginalized. This paper aims to move away from this accepted view by examining original historical works, such as Hennig’s 1950 work. It argues that these so-called assumptions constitute a profound misrepresentation of Hennig’s actual writings and epistemic assumptions, and that “Hennig’s Dilemma” is more accurately understood as “Felsenstein’s Dilemma,” a persistent uncertainty over this historical misinterpretation of Hennig’s work. Hennig's so-called dilemma, I argue, functioned as a powerful rhetorical device that, while influential, does not hold up to scrutiny against Hennig’s original texts. The enduring nature of this conflict suggests that we have not, in fact, moved beyond the systematics wars.</p>