Shared pain

Arguing "The specification allows us to do this" isn't something that convinces the people who consume your code. Arguing "Our design makes it difficult" is more convincing, but implies that your design stage ignored your users. "We made this tradeoff for these reasons" is something that people understand, but isn't something I've seen clearly articulated in most of these discussions. It just usually ends up with strawman arguments about well how did you expect this stuff to end up on disk when you didn't fsync, which just makes people feel like you don't even care about pretending to understand what they're actually asking for.

(Abstract you throughout)