On Fri, 2 Sep 2011, Robert P. Goldman wrote:

I can see that I didn't explain this as well as I might. It is too late for me to try again now, but I will have a whack sometime over the long weekend. The short answer is that Xach's test case actually revealed that the reuse of old component objects could leave ASDF in a very bad state (modified components with some old attributes, components that were obsolete retained, etc.).

Don't do the write-up just for me. It looks like you have good reasons for this change, and that other solutions would be unnecessarily complex. Thanks, Daniel