> then you hit the section of the docs that says "no, you shouldn't, they should be uniformly balanced". (Though honestly, I've never felt any negative side-eff

> then you hit the section of the docs that says "no, you shouldn't, they should be uniformly balanced". (Though honestly, I've never felt any negative side-effects from ignoring this You likely won’t, unless you hit a bucket size that has at least a billion small files inside. If you get into the trillion and above range and are heavily unbalanced due to a recent deploy of yours, ooops, there goes S3. Or it did in 2013 anyway.