To be clear the team had a day off and it was a holiday, it was not a do your own thing, it was a 4 day week and 3 day weekend. We are trialling this again, but it was not as effective as it could have been in many ways and ok in other ways. So not a simple one at all.
That should not be the case, the older the node should not affect how much data it holds. That is more evenly spread, but …
There is 2 sources of pain right now
- We are not convinced the close group is being effectively returned
- We are not convinced the dead nodes are not polluting and on occasion killing searches (there is an Alph and beta param, set to 3 and 1 respectively and these are the kademlia params).
These 2 issues seem to be real, but we are working hard on them to identify and fix, there are some great things happening to prove this quickly. So given these may be issues then we do need to fix Tham and that could cause the issue you report here @neo but a bug as opposed to a design issue with older nodes.
Soon, soon that will be where the biggest rewards come from
What I posted was a very very high level overview of the thinking. Even the dedicated team need a ton of presentations and meetings to describe this. It’s beyond us to put it in easy to digest messages, so we do try and Bux and the team there do try very hard to stay very high level and get direction. So messaging is hard as hell, I could not do it, but we need to get direction and keep it. That comes from payments and rewards and there is a team working unbelievably hard doing that while the Engineers are in the background trying to give them something to build on.
So we have some folk taking slack for others to fix stuff to allow the team taking the slack to be able to move forward and it’s all happening in real time and we are trying to explain what we can when we can. The weekly updates do try and shine a light on that weeks investigations etc.
It’s no simple task to explain this ant colony and all its parts 
D: