Context matters. There are some underlying assumptions not discussed here. You can see them in the content like... > Pain point: too much metadata and > I ex

Context matters. There are some underlying assumptions not discussed here. You can see them in the content like... > Pain point: too much metadata and > I expect any modern Linux distribution to only transfer absolutely required data to complete my task. Consider the case of searching for a package. That search can be performed locally and you would need the metadata locally or it can be performed remotely and the results sent over the wire. It has to be performed somewhere. If performed remotely than the remote endpoint knows what you've been searching for. If you are trying to perform a search across multiple package repos how do you to that securely? How do you not leak information? The remote endpoint can capture, log, and use information about who searched for what. Then tie that back to company and other data. There's a lot of sensitive corporate information that can be contained in these searches. So, do you do perform searches remotely or locally? Many systems choose locally but that entails downloads a dataset. There are a bunch of things like this to take into account. Other things, like serial downloads, are likely a product of the package managers age. I would hope modern ones work out parallel downloads.