Is it deterministic in a way that's useful? From the perspective of the end-user its going to appear random because they don't control the system environment w

Is it deterministic in a way that's useful? From the perspective of the end-user its going to appear random because they don't control the system environment where "highest revision number" can mean something useful to them. In fact, the CouchDB guide even alludes to this when they talk about not relying on this scheme for complex conflict resolution it seems. Two nodes split. A and B. Say there are 100 updates to A and 500 updates to B. The split heals, the system picks B because 500 > 100, but the write you actually want to dominate is A. The user can't control which replica gets hit more often, or when a split happens, so while this might be deterministic inside the DB it is semantically random from the user's perspective. So the system can make the same choice on all replicas, assuming it can guarantee it has seen all replicas, which I guess allows you to push merging management to each replica instead of requiring an intermediate coordination replica and then re-publishing the merge state to the replicas? So there's a system optimization benefit there. But consider if the system did pick a winner at random, how would this look any different to the user? The user doesn't necessarily know if A or B should be picked. Deterministic behavior is really important, but it seems like it really only looks non-random to the end user when deterministically picking a least upper bound for converging a join-semilattice or when all operations on the data are commutative or idempotent doesn't it?