[esbeeb]

There's a happy medium to be found here - balancing ease of use, while avoiding the bug fountain. Having said that, IMHO we should err on the side of avoiding the bug fountain. Make it as simple as possible, but not simpler.

Robbing the future with deceptive over-simplicity - by creating a bunch of future difficult debugging scenarios and possibly footguns - is the far worse evil, than missing out on the maximally-convenient onboarding (which can be foolishly optimized for, for the sake of short-term popularity). All such crap-tastic solutions will eventually need to be replaced again anyway, creating an endless, hellish, slow churn.

[lolxmlhateonhn]

I like rigid schemas for write and supporting both loose and rigid reads. Generally the friction in a system like that is something like the ad hoc SRE trying to load up a type stack just to interpret a protobuf log. Or Tableau. Stuff like that. That’s where people get annoyed. I think you’re right and there’s a lot of unexplored directions of simplicity.

Computers that understand the shape of your data are very helpful friends when you’re pursuing goals like data locality.