Though the three-body problem for baryons is not too complicated when appropriate methods are used, some simplifications are welcome, especially if in addition to the technical aspects, they shed some light on the quark dynamics. In this respect, one should acknowledge that the hyperscalar approximation does not have any simple and obvious physical interpretation. One may simply say that, out of the many degrees of freedom, one can extract one collective distance which governs the main features of the wave function.
In contrast, the quark–diquark approximation and the Born–Oppenheimer approximation, when they are valid, immediately tell us that the dynamics lies essentially in one single interquark separation, and that we are dealing with an effective two-body problem.