[bob1029]

I appreciate the commentary. I feel most of this effectively boils down to "it depends". Clearly, there is no one-size-fits-all solution that can make everyone happy all the time, especially considering all the constraints & variables present across the entire vertical.

Where your datacenters are geographically located is usually a big first step in even starting these types of conversations. The nature of "maybe sync replication represents a liability or is feasible" might be a conversation about the geography of a region and statistical likelihood of certain disasters impacting multiple sites simultaneously.

Some customers cant ever afford to lose a single transaction no matter what, some just need it to be reasonably stable but incredibly fast (e.g. gaming vs banking).

Will definitely be spending some time reviewing Lamport's works again. Establishing the notion of stable time between all participants is a fascinating way to solve a lot of problems in distributed systems.