part of the fun is that it's hard to know ahead of time if you can afford large buffers or not.
when you are building and configuring a system, how do you know if the output is going to a recorder (where latency is acceptable), or to speakers (where it's not)
since there are some cases where you need the real time response, why not use that setting all the time rather than having one set of settings if you are going from live to live and a different set of settings if you are doing something where latency is acceptable?