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I think the point was to trim down the beast. For that you need tradeoff some features I guess. So small int were cut off. As were triggers, views and stored proc. Most of which is hardly used by target audience, webdev that is.

There are plans to bring back at least stored procs very soon. But to do them properly and as a plugin type (so if you don't need them they aren't there)

With InnoDB I believe that it stores the smaller int types as 4 byte anyway. But I am not an expert on this particular section code.

In theory you could pack the values in yourself into the larger columns.