[flqn]

In this case you are assuming not to have P. The traditional idea of "pick 2 of 3" with respect to CAP is weirdly formulated because you either have a distributed system, in which case P is a given and you must trade C vs A, or you don't have a distributed system and can therefore have both C and A.

[hasty_pudding]

I think there needs to be another variable which is response time.

Because you can have a well partitioned system with good data redundancy, and you can take time to let the system become consistent which reduces availability.

But the actual practical outcome of changing availability is changing response time.

Therefore, consistency time is directly and linearly related to response time.

And if the response time is below some threshold that you no longer care about then you have beaten CAP theorem.

So in a practical sense, you can beat the CAP theorem. In an abstract sense you cant.

But response time grounds the theorem to reality because it in every system, there's a point of optimization that no longer matters.