One pattern I've seen emerge as SN's relational complexity increases: you should prefer slow, complicated writes and fast, trivial reads to fast writes and slow reads. And especially when comprehensive and aggregate data reads are expected. Else you end up deducing relationships and history at read time which is inefficient and error prone.

It's kind of like the difference between someone pedantically stating their intent vs. guessing about their intent based on the result. If intent matters, and it almost always does, you should prefer the former.