For some things it’s definitely useful (though I’m not convinced of the speed when creating longer processing chains).
It gets confusing when that same dimension is used to express two types of data (like the start/end boundaries and slice points, like the problem in this original thread, which also shows up in @leafcutterjohn’s great patch/abstraction).
I honestly can’t picture the solutions that will have to come when the data gets multidimensional. Hell, even with a single dimension I’m struggling to figure out how to manage long “buffer lists” of stats and descrioptors. When I have a buffer with 30+ frames in it, and each frame is in a different range, means something else, and I never know whether the first channel is 0 or 1.
I guess this will matter less when individual channels don’t mean as much, and it all ends up in the hands of the machine learning algorithms, where they don’t need or care what the numbers are.
What really turned my head though, was to learn that something like the ampslice~ object will have separate buffers (I presume) for onsets and offsets. That seems like a pain in the butt.