Code change:
The basic data element of MOQT is an object.  An object is an addressable unit whose payload is a sequence of bytes.  All objects belong to a group, indicating ordering and potential dependencies. <del> model-group Objects are comprised of two parts: metadata and a payload.  The metadata is never encrypted and is always visible to relays.  The payload portion may be encrypted, in which case it is only visible to the producer and consumer.  The application is solely responsible for the content of the object payload.  This includes the underlying encoding, compression, any end-to-end encryption, or authentication.  A relay MUST NOT combine, split, or otherwise modify object payloads. </del> <ins> model-group An object is uniquely identified by its track namespace, track name, group ID, and object ID, and must be an identical sequence of bytes regardless of how or where it is retrieved.  An Object can become unavailable, but it's contents MUST NOT change over time. Objects are comprised of two parts: metadata and a payload.  The metadata is never encrypted and is always visible to relays.  The payload portion may be encrypted, in which case it is only visible to the producer and consumer.  The application is solely responsible for the content of the object payload.  This includes the underlying encoding, compression, any end-to-end encryption, or authentication. A relay MUST NOT combine, split, or otherwise modify object payloads. </ins> 2.2.

Related discussion:
text: If the subscriptions were -345, -2, -1, the relay could decide to make two subscriptions upstream - one for -345, the other for -2, because it didn't want to force the smaller relative subscriptions to wait for the larger one. The point is, this is optimization logic for the relay. It does have a choice in what subscriptions it sends upstream based on the timing and diversity of the input subscriptions. Why is the latency of the join affected? Consider a subscriber talking to an edge where the subscriber is 100ms away from the origin. We consider two scenarios: in the first case the subscriber receives a SUBSCRIBEOK immediately after subscribing but then waits 100ms for the audio and video to arrive from the origin. In the second case the the subscriber waits 100ms to receive SUBSCRIBEOK but it is immediately followed by the audio and video. So in both cases the subscriber gets its audio and video after 100ms. The media latency is consistent under either scenario.
If the relay logc is to send only a single subscribe upstream, then you don't need anything to be said in Subscribe OK either. Since when the first object arrives it can compute the live edge by adding 5 to the object being reported and the compute the absolute values for others (in this case for -3 and -1). That would definitely make things simpler for sure.
For cases where a client wants to go back 345 groups in past, i will be very much inclined to do an absolute request after learning the latest known state of the group as an end application OR something catalog can describe more information to make the right absolute request on the first go
It can't do this because the order of items it receives as Streams is not guaranteed. The origin may send the groups in order -5,-4,-3,-3,-1, but they could be received at the relay (or any hop) as -3, -5,-4,-1,-2. That's why you need an explicit notification from the origin as to where the live edge is. Only that plus the group sequence numbers allow the correct sequencing, not the order of arrival.
In this case there was just a single subscribe request with -5 was sent upstream, based on your explanation above. This avoids all the confusion which would happen when there are multiple inflight -ve offsets.
This seems like it will have many race conditions.