You're ducking the question IMO. Why is him asking Hae for a ride then lying to police THREE different times not useful for more than a "smear" job?
As I said in my response to Seamus, you have to make assumptions to determine that Adnan lied, and there are innocent explanations for lying to the police.
How specifically is anything in my list specifically comparable to weird random employment records saying that Don was maybe a crappy employee? Did he write "I'm going to kill" on the back of his employment reviews and then an employee turned up dead?
No, but there is some evidence he fabricated an alibi using his time cards, just like there is some evidence that Adnan is lying about the ride.
Were his fingerprints on a map? Did someone like Cathy also see Don that night acting very strange, get a call from the police, and 30 minutes later his phone is pinging close to her burial site? Not a single thing SS posted about Don is specific to his relationship to Hae or any intent to do her harm, while everything in my list is. Don's employment reviews, in fact, would likely have been excluded at trial as impermissible character evidence, while most or all of the above was admitted.
The prosecution certainly would have been able to argue he fabricated his time card, as I said above. But if you don't like the Don example, then fine. The primary problem there is lack of data - people didn't peer as deep into Don's life as they do for your typical murder suspect. But cops do peer into the lives of the wrongfully convicted, and they have lots of seemingly suspicious details just like Adnan that later turn out to be coincidence. I think your appetizer analogy is accurate in this respect.
First, if you look at all the posts here, you'll find a wide variety of opinions on Jay's veracity among those who think Adnan is guilty.
Can you find me anyone who thinks Adnan is guilty, but that Jay was uninvolved? People who think Adnan is guilty disagree about how much of Jay's story is true, but they all agree that Jay was involved enough to know Adnan killed Hae.
Taken all together, for me it builds to a strong case, and at the very least, contrary to what OP said, is not a case at all for which there was NO evidence but 1 or 2 things.
I agree with you that this stuff is technically "evidence." I mean it was properly introduced in court. But I don't think it has more than minimal value, because as wrongful convictions demonstrate, this sort of stuff is present whether or not someone is guilty. It isn't like the prosecution won those cases based on "1 or 2" things that where later disproven either...there was also a bunch of peripheral stuff that nobody cared about anymore once the core vanished.
And I think counterfactuals show how unimportant this evidence is. If DNA tests revealed a serial killer's DNA under Hae's fingernails, or if Jay confessed he actually committed the murder alone, people would stop thinking Adnan was guilty, because all these facts are just details that are helpful in building a narrative.