That seems pretty absolute! Bitstream encoding of everything would introduce a lot of complexity. There are places where it's called for, but I think in many ma

That seems pretty absolute! Bitstream encoding of everything would introduce a lot of complexity. There are places where it's called for, but I think in many many places the status quo of rounding up to 1/2/4 bytes is a better solution than either bitstream encoding or rounding up to 8 bytes.