Hacker News Reader

I think the key is "eventually" consistent. As long as you can determine when the data are consistent, I think it bears some consideration.

I don't generally care about today's sales in real time. But tomorrow, I want all the data to be consistent, and I want to know it is consistent when I get my reports.

I don't think that BASE is at odds with that concept.

Amazon runs most of its stuff on eventually consistent systems. They do pretty well, as you can see, so your thesis of "A is clearly more importnat than B" is disproven.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tradeoff