Yep, you are so right about that. This is one of those pesky details that I was holding back on until @engelsanchez convinced me to get it the PR up for discussion. Crashing the VM is not an option, so this is a great catch, which I'll address.

While I appreciate any review from you, I'm mostly hoping that you'll come at it from the perspective of "is this good for riak?" and "is the impact on the vnode acceptable?" and "why the f*ck aren't we just using AAE?". All of those are @jtuple level questions :-)