I think I am not following some nuance; given:
4 4 2 16
8 8 4 2
pulling that 4 up into its friends yields ? ? 8 16
8 8 2 2
which after seeing that behavior across several combinations (2 2 2 -> 4) I'm now guessing the actual rules are "The more tiles in the match, the higher the resulting tile will be, PROVIDED IT IS A POWER OF 2". So, one must join at least 3, but only the power-of-2 pairs count, the other tile just evaporates