I guess you can look at the issue two ways. In one considerations are like special replies and therefore are objects in of themselves. The other way is to look at them as being attributes. I think they make more sense as attributes, and therefore to me making them first order objects doesnt fit my mental map. I dont want to view a given consideration, I want to view a node and its considerations. Etc etc.

Nodes are never destroyed, so you can't clean them up. We get a far number of considerations per posts, over time it clogs up the node table.

Maybe I'm not expressing myself properly here, but I do see this an overall issue. We are now have ~ 600,000 posts, if you start adding a consideration node, lets say 1 per 20 posts, i see that as unnecessary growth of the node table for what is really very little benefit. Its unlikely that one will want to view the full consideration history of a node for very long, maybe a month or so for an extremely contentious posting. But anything that goes in the node table is forever. And everything that goes into the node table affects the performance of the site, across the board.

Anyway, my view on this is that the msg idea had a lot of merit. It wouldnt be hard to extend the private message system to handle the needs of consideration. Occasionally these can be purged etc etc.