This question evaluates string-processing and algorithm-design skills within the Coding & Algorithms domain, focusing on balancing parentheses, correctness proofs for minimal edits, and time/space complexity analysis.

Given a string s containing lowercase letters and the characters '(' and ')', remove the minimum number of parentheses so that the resulting string is valid (balanced and properly ordered). Return any one valid result while preserving the relative order of the remaining characters. Target O(n) time and O(n) or O(