The fact that tideline is converting to an array is an implementation detail of tideline's choice of the priority of the fields.  There is nothing intrinsic in this data about the required ordering of the fields and the fact that tideline is choosing to convert into an array is more a reflection of how tideline has chosen to access the structure than anything.

Tideline also does a lot of `_.filter(array_of_thousands, { id: 'just_one_id' })` to get a single element out, which is really just an inefficient random-access and doesn't actually indicate that the data *should* be an array instead of some other data structure that would support and encourage faster interactions.