Max, as you point out, is necessary to actually see the long tail. What a strange way to put it. No one wants to see the long tail. The long tail is the means,

Max, as you point out, is necessary to actually see the long tail. What a strange way to put it. No one wants to see the long tail. The long tail is the means, not the end. To a lesser extent even percentile buckets can be deceiving if they're too big. 99th percentile with 5-min buckets can miss significant but brief (~3 second) degradations. Now that's the actual reason to care about max. Otherwise you have values (and often negative user experiences) getting lost in the aggregation.