the strong-coupling limit before destroying superconductivity in the shell. Additionally, several subsequent studies based on a numerical self-consistent Schrödinger-Poisson approach [@Antipov:2018; @Woods:2018; @Mikkelsen:2018] have also shown that a great degree of fine tuning of experimental parameters is required to realize a topological phase in the presence of a strong coupling to a thin superconducting shell. Because it has been demonstrated that a hard superconducting gap, which is required for the topological protection of qubits encoded in MBSs, can only be experimentally induced in the nanowire in the strong-coupling limit [@deMoor:2018], it is possible that the observed zero-bias conductance peaks do not originate from MBSs.

Recently, an alternative explanation that the observed zero-bias peaks are due to topologically trivial ABSs originating within the quantum dot has been put forth [@Liu:2017; @Ptok:2017]. These trivial ABSs have subsequently been shown to also reproduce many experimental signatures of topological MBSs beyond zero-bias conductance peaks, such as quantized conductance, $4\pi$-periodic Josephson effect, and a high degree of nonlocality as measured by the coupling to a normal lead [@Setiawan:2017; @Moore:2018; @Vuik:2018; @Avila:2018; @Hansen:2018; @Elsa2]. However, previous studies have been restricted to numerical simulations and thus relatively little is known about precisely which properties of the system 