It's mostly PTSD from our massive follow lists and bookmark lists that break about half of the relays out there. We know shit breaks with large events.
Also, I would argue the opposite. Apps that don't use certain fields should not be forced to keep them in memory. Each app just downloads the exact content they need and leave bigger apps like Amethyst to suffer a bit with added memory. It's fine.
I never talked about following lists, these should stay separated, and maybe re-thinked to avoid the problems caused by the atomic structure.
About memory usage, we should reason keeping in consideration the real sizes: an average profile with 10 relays takes less than 1000 bytes, and the client can easily discard the useless data from memory as soon as it has been received.
Only if you need to download all the things, which most apps will never need to.
