Rewriting two decades of archive into a single field layout was the least glamorous thing we have shipped, and the most used.
The archive goes back to 2005 and until last year it was, honestly, four archives in a trench coat. Three acquisitions and one in-house format, each with its own field names, its own idea of what a timestamp meant and its own opinion about band ordering.
Why anyone cared
Insurance is why. A drought claim is an argument about a decade, not a week, and every branch a customer had to write to handle a 2011 scene differently from a 2024 one was a place for that argument to go wrong.
The unglamorous part
Fourteen months, one schema, 2.1 petabytes rewritten. No new capability, no demo, nothing to put in a launch post. It is now the most-called endpoint we have.
If there is a lesson it is that consistency is a feature, it just does not look like one until somebody has to defend a number in front of a regulator.