It turns out a neat definition of (wild?) category(?) in #hott obtains by supposing a notion of ternary composition based on generalizing from the following equivalence in cubical type theory:

`PathP A x y ≃ (∀ w → w ≡ x → ∀ z → y ≡ z → PathP A w z)`

Only in the general (categorical) case, we formulate this as an embedding, so we have a map s.t.:

`Hom x y ↪ (∀ w → Hom w x → ∀ z → Hom y z → Hom w z)`

derived from the map, some contractibility conditions, and an interchange axiom.

This has been a nice verification of an intuition I've nursed, inspired by a principle drawing on Carrette's work in agda-categories: treatment of categorical data ought to be presented in such a way that leads to a straightforward definition of the `op` map. Where I wanted to go further was to also suppose that a good definition ought to explicitly treat the fibration structure specific to the forward and opposite notions of composition inherent to the data of a category.
From this embedding, one derives a notion of composition such that it obeys certain properties with respect to the embedding structure and its certain contractible fibers. This allows you to derive the unit laws and associativity through direct arguments based on the contractible fibers included in/derivable from the data. Hopefully more interesting results continue to flow from this direction 🙏