For the record - the origin of SARS-1 is still unknown.

Dominic (SARS Boy), Bat Lady (Shi Zheng-li), Batman (Daszak), and Virus Hunter (Lipkin) all rose to fame through their SARS-1 involvements. Coincidentally, they've played the roles of highest-platformed advocates of the CCP’s version of everything ever since.

Unlike SARS Boy and Virus Hunter, Bat Lady and Batman were convinced that civets had nothing to do with SARS-1. Here is their evidence from a 2006 paper written along with Wang Lin-fa (Aust CSIRO/Duke/WIV):

During the 2002–2003 outbreaks, none of the animal traders surveyed in the markets, who supposedly had very close contact with live civets, displayed SARS symptoms. .. The lack of widespread infection in wild or farmed palm civets makes them unlikely to have been the natural reservoir host.

Then in 2013, another Shi/Daszak/Linfa Wang (NIH funded) collaboration announced in an EcoHealth Press Release: that they had:
...uncovered genome sequences of a new (bat) virus closely related to SARS (thereby) .. precluding civets from playing a part in the transmission process.

The paper states: Our results provide the strongest evidence to date ...that intermediate hosts may not be necessary for direct human infection by some bat SL-CoVs.

Even Lipkin, like Dwyer, a pro-intermediate zealot, is quoted as admitting:

This paper hasn’t resolved the provenance of SARS CoV; nonetheless, it does provide compelling evidence that an intermediate host was not necessary.

Bat Lady/Batman’s ‘discovery’ of the closest known match to SARS (“nearly 97 percent” according to Scientific American - strangely, that's the only ref i can find), is marginally higher than RaTG13’s 96.3% match with SARS-2.

Finally in 2017, the same researchers proclaimed they'd found all "the building blocks" in a cave in Yunnan - 1000 km away from Guangdong. Meaning they could theoretically piece together SARS from different bats. But still no explanation of how that theoretical bat traveled 1000km, without infecting anyone on the way, and no demonstration of its theoretical virus being able to jump from bats to humans (or civets).

Intriguingly, we can deduce that they must have spent a lot of lab-hours trying to piece this bat virus together to prove their theory. Is that how SARS-2 was created? Nature claims it was the "smoking gun" for SARS-1 - it wasn't - but it may be for SARS-2.

So what do we know?

• Despite exhaustive efforts to find Dominic's ‘sort of intermediate animal virus’, none have been found.
  
• The closest match is a bat virus found in 2013 by Shi/Daszak.
  
• In 2017 Shi/Cui claimed to have found "the building blocks" - but still no single bat that carried the same strain - and no demonstration of how it could infect humans.
  
• None of this “has resolved the provenance of SARS CoV”.

Therefore, your premise, Dominic - “it’s always been the pattern - from bats to some sort of animal into humans”, is: wrong.

Therefore, your conclusion, based on this premise, is: wrong. Sorry.

It's 'wrongness' does raise some questions though.

Although Shi's/Daszak's Yunnan bat was 1000 km from Guangdong, it was only a few km's from Kunming Biological Products Factory, which according to Eric Croddy (2001), specialized in "Research and cultivation of various bio-weapons agents." (p28)

Did SARS also involve engineering scientists and a lab accident? We don’t know. Why don’t we know? Same reason as this time: the SARS response/investigation was a cover-up from go to woe - so there's "no evidence".

(Note: follow up to SARS-1 origin has been split from the Dwyer thread. It continues here.)