What is more important, putting in more features or releasing sooner? Always a tension there. I don't know the answer.

Astral isn't the best performing client for sure, but it's got the best feature set of the web based clients with the fewest issues. The really fast ones often fail to load profile data, are missing event data, etc. It's a trade off: better performance or fuller data set.

What I'm proposing is that each relay store all of the reactions in a single event rather than a bunch of separate events so a client can make a single call and iterate through all of the reactions to tally them up. That's not different than what is done now except that it's not in a bunch of separate events that require the relay to scan its db for all of the reactions and the client to wait on receiving all of those separate reaction events rather than a single event with a single indexed key that's extremely efficient to lookup and send to the client.