[lidavidm]

Yup. The chattiness is to account for distributed databases, so you can spread the result set across multiple instances.

That said there is a proposal for base Flight RPC to help allow embedding small results directly into the first response, that mostly needs someone to draft a prototype and push it through. (That doesn't help the case of a large-ish response from a single backend, though; that may also need some work, if we want to get rid of the second request.)