Hi!
Aside from the "bogus entries" and "looks fragile" bits?
Bogus entry? What about broken links? Are they bogus entries? "Looks fragile"? Of course, having query recaching scripts, that quite often get killed, is not fragile at all. And everyone knows that we don't have any fragile features, site_stats is the most trusted and stable counter in the world. :)
I don't like it either.
Well, no wonder. You're after elegant solutions and procedures: "The schema change requirement was noted and made quite clear. If it wasn't taken live before the software was updated, it's no fault of the development team. " As you remember, that schema change was not needed at all, and one- line change fixed the performance completely. It wasn't elegant (dedicated indexing, tables, columns, etc - wow, how nice), but it was practical.
And I appreciate practical solutions, cause we have a site to run.
Cheers,