I would not say that it’s obvious, kind3 was simple and it has worked for years. There werent even 1400 people on the network when it first came out. If we over complicated the protocol on day 1 by trying to plan for every future scenario it might not have taken off.

Event sourcing contact list events *is* more complicated. It takes more storage space, and hits relay return limits (500) if you’re trying to pull the full list, which forces you to do multiple paginated queries to sync your list. It’s doable, just a bit annoying.