I don't know that deleting these validation checks is a good idea. It leaves us with essentially no description of the message format. Just leave these asserts in, assume they work, and don't worry about old messages for now. As explained on IRC, as soon as we have proper error handling in consumers, this will all work and bad messages will end up in a dead-letter queue where we can look at them. Silently discarding bad messages is not the way forward.