@lrhodes why do you think it is "presumptuous" to assume that?

There's nothing in the protocol that I can see that weighs in favor of that interpretation. It's a mastodon-ism, perhaps, but that's not the same thing as "presumptuous" to infer from the protocol, which places no restrictions on this one way or another

What's more, what specific clause are you objecting to that you think of as "big data"? Because that term has a very specific meaning to me and I don't see it in the ATProto docs.